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Copyright^ . 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT: 



THE ROOSEVELT BOOK 




Copyright, 1904, by Arthur Hewitt. 




From a photograph taken by Arthur Hewitt in the Green Room of the 
™ F 6 White House, March 19, 1904- 



THE ROOSEVELT BOOK 

SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS OF 

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 

ROBERT BRIDGES 



ILLUSTRATED 



NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION 



j ) 

i , » 



NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1909 






Copyright, 1904, 1909, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 




fofCONC 

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APR 21 woy 



PUBLISHER'S NOTE 

The extracts published in this volume are 
made with the kind permission of the publish- 
ers of the various books. The selections en- 
titled " The American Boy," " The Strenuous 
Life/' "Grant," and "The Big-Horn Sheep" 
are taken from " The Strenuous Life " and 
"Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail" by per- 
mission of The Century Co. ; " The Heritage of 
Noble Deeds," " Frontier Character," " Daniel 
Boone," and "The Grisly Bear" are from 
" American Ideals," " The Winning of the 
West," and " Hunting the Grisly " by permis- 
sion of G. P. Putnam's Sons. The other ex- 
tracts are from " The Rough Riders " (Charles 
Scribner's Sons), from Scribners Magazine, 
from President Roosevelt's public addresses, 
and from one of the volumes of the Boone 
and Crockett Club. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction xi 

The Good Citizen i 

The American Boy 3 

The Heritage of Noble Deeds . . . it 

The Strenuous Life 21 

" Doers of the Word " 30 

The Pioneer 35 

The Pioneer 37 

Frontier Character 44 

Daniel Boone 57 

The Hero .67 

The True Basis of Heroism .... 69 

Abraham Lincoln 72 

Grant 80 

Some Rough Rider Heroes 94 

The Battle of San Juan Hill .... 107 

vii 



Vlll 



Contents 



Hunting Wild Animals . . . 
Old Ephraim, the Grisly Bear 
The Big-Horn Sheep . 
The Bobcat ...... 

The Cougar .,..•• 



PAGS 

135 

m 

156 

l 77 



• 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

President Roosevelt Frontispiece ' 



FACING 
PAGE 



Daniel Boone 58 . 

General U. S. Grant at Headquarters in the 

Wilderness, May, 1864 — Aged 42 • • • 80 
Wounded Rough Riders Coming Over the Hill 

at Siboney io2 ,, 

General Wheeler and Group of Rough Rider 



Officers IIO 



/ 



The Fight at the Kettles — San Juan . . . .118 
Theodore Roosevelt in Hunting Costume — 

About 1886 ^6 

A Grisly Bear in the Wilds of Wyoming . . 142 

Heads of Two Big-Horn Sheep 156 

A Bobcat in a Tree — Colorado 172 

A Cougar Treed 188 

The First Cougar Killed 194 



INTRODUCTION 

It is a good thing for Young Americans to 
be familiar with the books written by Theodore 
Roosevelt, not because he is President of the 
United States, but because, whether cowboy, 
Assemblyman, Police or Civil Service Commis- 
sioner, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Colonel 
of the Rough-Riders, Governor of New York, 
Vice-President, or President of the United 
States, he has always been the right kind of an 
American citizen. He has loved this country 
from his youth with a fervor inherited from 
generations of patriotic men. He has always 
been a man who has had no use for an emotion 
that does not lead to action. It was impossible 
for him to be patriotic and not do something to 
show it. He was proud of the history of this 
country, and he was hardly out of college when 
he began the preparation of a work on "The 

xi 



xii Introduction 

Naval War of 1812" — a field that had been to 
that time almost neglected. It was published 
when he was only twenty-four years of age. I 
once asked a competent historian of the navy 
who had been studying the period, whether he 
had found it a useful book. He replied that, 
with all his special study, he had found only two 
bad errors in it. I told this to Mr. Roosevelt, 
and he replied that he thought he could point 
out more than that. But, at any rate, here is 
the work of a very young man, which has stood 
the test for its thoroughness. With his vigor- 
ous ideas about the duty of every citizen to do 
things, it was natural for him to plunge into po- 
litical life as soon as the opportunity offered. 
He went into the New York Assembly with a 
dash, energy, and directness that won for him 
prompt recognition. That kind of young man 
was new in the New York Legislature in the 
early eighties. But he compelled attention by 
his honesty of purpose and fervent efforts to 
make that purpose real by deeds. From then 
till now he has been a conspicuous figure in 
public life. 



Introduction xiii 

To do things, and do them persistently and 
well, he found out early in life that it was neces- 
sary to have a body capable of endurance. He 
knew that flabby muscles helped to make flabby 
thought and inefficient action. So all his life he 
has striven after a clean, well-trained, healthy 
body. He read the lives of great men and 
learned that good blood that had sunshine in it 
helped them to do great deeds. His buying a 
ranch and living the life of a cowboy was not 
the idle freak of a young man. He knew that 
States in the raw were being made out there 
in the West by the kind of men who had 
pushed the frontier of this country, through a 
hundred years, from the Alleghanies to the Pa- 
cific. He wanted to be a part of it, to have for 
his own the body of a pioneer and the thoughts 
of a pioneer. For that reason all over the West 
to-day they say, "We like that man. He speaks 
our language." He can't do anything by halves. 
He might have been an idle "gentleman ranch- 
er," as so many were, but he lived the life for all 
that was in it, and became a good cowboy, an 
expert hunter, a zealous deputy sheriff, and a 



xiv Introduction 

good deal of a naturalist besides. All these 
things he learned by frankly going to men who 
knew more about them at first hand than he did, 
and watching how they did it, and talking with 
them about it. 

Half a dozen books have grown out of this 
side of his life, and they are full of instances 
which show his capacity for learning things 
from the men who really knew them. His gen- 
erous praise and enthusiasm for the expert 
plainsman, the wily trapper, the fearless cow- 
boy, the tireless hunter, are expressed in every 
chapter. He learned things by intelligent ap- 
preciation of others and not by jealous rivalry. 
That is one of his most attractive traits. 

It is "playing the game fair" that appeals to 
him first, and then "hitting the line hard." 
Even opponents and rivals like that kind of a 
man. Cow-punchers, foot-ball heroes, and po- 
litical bosses have yielded admiration to it. And 
no boy can read what he has written and not 
feel the charm of it. 

All his hunting stories are full of this spirit 
of fair play. That is why he is always called 



Introduction xv 

"a good sportsman." When he is hunting big 
game he gives the animal a fair chance. He is 
scornful of a pot-hunter and a game butcher. 
To him the pleasure of the sport lies in pitting 
his wit and endurance against the wiliness and 
strength of the wild animal in its native region. 
There are just as many stories in his books of 
the wild animals that outwitted him as of those 
that he killed. It was the chase that stirred his 
blood. One of his old guides in Wyoming once 
told me with pride, "Mr. Roosevelt always 
picked his head." He would let a whole drove 
of elk escape rather than shoot an inferior head. 
Out of this fine free life on the plains grew 
his keen interest in the history of that region. 
With his accustomed energy he was not satisfied 
with skimming the surface from books already 
published, but he went to the sources of history. 
The result is his most ambitious historical work, 
"The Winning of the West." Nearly every 
page of it shows in the foot-notes how indus- 
triously he investigated letters, journals, docu- 
ments, oral tradition, and State archives. He 
blazed the trail for the future historian. The 



xvi Introduction 

heroes of this book are the Pioneers. To him 
they are the real "makers of America." 

It was the brave conquest of nature which 
they made that appealed to him, for above all 
things he likes a square, upstanding contest, 
whether it is against a wilderness, a mountain, 
wild animals, or men. His joy in these things is 
infectious. That explains the power and fasci- 
nation of his leadership. Boys and men like to 
follow a man who gets joy out of his life; and 
that is why the men in his regiment idolized 
him. He played the game fair, and he played it 
on exactly the same terms as the humblest pri- 
vate in the ranks. Moreover, he expected just 
that spirit in all of them and he lifted them up 
to it by the force of his enthusiasm. 

There was never a man who was on the look- 
out for what was good in other men who failed 
to have a sense of humor. This very apprecia- 
tion of all kinds of people reveals the amusing 
differences between them. It illuminates the 
motives which control other people. A frank, 
direct, sincere man like Mr. Roosevelt is for 
that reason not an easy man to fool. Politicians 



Introduction xvii 

have misinterpreted his simple frankness, and 
have suddenly found themselves thoroughly 
seen through. 

The books which have grown out of his pub- 
lic life — u The Strenuous Life," "American 
Ideals," "Administration and Civil Service," 
and "Presidential Addresses"- — are just the ex- 
pression of this direct, vigorous, healthy, and 
joyous nature when it applied itself to the tasks 
which came to him as Police and Civil Service 
Commissioner, Governor or President. There 
is no portentous solemnity of meaningless 
phrases in his speeches and addresses. He 
knows every kind of American, East and West, 
and he speaks to him in the language of sim- 
plicity and sincerity. "The good citizen is the 
man who, whatever his wealth or his poverty, 
strives manfully to do his duty to himself, to 
his family, to his neighbor, to the State ; who is 
incapable of the baseness which manifests itself 
either in arrogance or in envy, but who, while 
demanding justice for himself, is no less scru- 
pulous to do justice to others. It is because the 
average American citizen, rich or poor, is of 



xviii Introduction 

just this type that we have cause for our pro- 
found faith in the future of the Republic." 

This is the kind of man who is, I believe, re- 
vealed in the extracts from his books here print- 
ed. The Young American who reads them will 
not only be interested in them, but will be in- 
spirited by them and touched with admiration 
for the pioneers and heroes of our Country, and 
will earnestly believe in its people and its des- 
tiny. 

Robert Bridges. 



THE GOOD CITIZEN 



THE AMERICAN BOY 

Of course what we have a right to expect of 
the American boy is that he shall turn out to be 
a good American man. Now, the chances are 
strong that he won't be much of a man unless 
he is a good deal of a boy. He must not be a 
coward or a weakling, a bully, a shirk, or a prig. 
He must work hard and play hard. He must be 
clean-minded and clean-lived, and able to hold 
his own under all circumstances and against all 
comers. It is only on these conditions that he 
will grow into the kind of American man of 
whom America can be really proud. 

There are always in life countless tendencies 
for good and for evil,«and each succeeding gen- 
eration sees some of these tendencies strength- 
ened and some weakened; nor is it by any means 
always, alas ! that the tendencies for evil are 
weakened and those for good strengthened. But 
during the last few decades there certainly have 
been some notable changes for good in boy life. 
The great growth in the love of athletic sports, 
for instance, while fraught with danger if it be- 

3 



4 The Good Citizen 

comes one-sided and unhealthy, has beyond all 
question had an excellent effect in increased man- 
liness. Forty or fifty years ago the writer on 
American morals was sure to deplore the effemi- 
nacy and luxury of young Americans who were 
born of rich parents. The boy who was well off 
then, especially in the big Eastern cities, lived 
too luxuriously, took to billiards as his chief in- 
nocent recreation, and felt small shame in his in- 
ability to take part in rough pastimes and field- 
sports. Nowadays, whatever other faults the 
son of rich parents may tend to develop, he is at 
least forced by the opinion of all his associates 
of his own age to bear himself well in manly ex- 
ercises and to develop his body — and therefore, 
to a certain extent, his character — in the rough 
sports which call for pluck, endurance, and phys- 
ical address. 

Of course boys who live under such fortu- 
nate conditions that they have to do either a 
good deal of outdoor work or a good deal of 
what might be called natural outdoor play do 
not need this athletic development. In the Civil 
War the soldiers who came from the prairie and 
the backwoods and the rugged farms where 
stumps still dotted the clearings, and who had 
learned to ride in their infancy, to shoot as soon 
as they could handle a rifle, and to camp out 



The American Boy 5 

whenever they got the chance, were better fitted 
for military work than any set of mere school or 
college athletes could possibly be. Moreover, to 
mis-estimate athletics is equally bad whether 
their importance is magnified or minimized. 
The Greeks were famous athletes, and as long as 
their athletic training had a normal place in their 
lives, it was a good thing. But it was a very bad 
thing when they kept up their athletic games 
while letting the stern qualities of soldiership 
and statesmanship sink into disuse. Some of the 
younger readers of this book will certainly 
sometime read the famous letters of the younger 
Pliny, a Roman who wrote, with what seems to 
us a curiously modern touch, in the first century 
of the present era. His correspondence with the 
Emperor Trajan is particularly interesting; and 
not the least noteworthy thing in it is the tone of 
contempt with which he speaks of the Greek ath- 
letic sports, treating them as the diversions of an 
unwarlike people which it was safe to encourage 
in order to keep the Greeks from turning into 
anything formidable. So at one time the Per- 
sian kings had to forbid polo, because soldiers 
neglected their proper duties for the fascinations 
of the game. We cannot expect the best work 
from soldiers who have carried to an unhealthy 
extreme the sports and pastimes which would be 



6 The Good Citizen 

healthy if indulged in with moderation, and 
have neglected to learn as they should the busi- 
ness of their profession. A soldier needs to 
know how to shoot and take cover and shift for 
himself — not to box or play foot-ball. There is, 
of course, always the risk of thus mistaking 
means for ends. 

When a man so far confuses ends and means 
as to think that fox-hunting, or polo, or foot- 
ball, or whatever else the sport may be, is to be 
itself taken as the end, instead of as the mere 
means of preparation to do work that counts 
when the time arises, when the occasion calls — 
why, that man had better abandon sport alto- 
gether. 

No boy can afford to neglect his work, and 
with a boy work, as a rule, means study. Of 
course there are occasionally brilliant successes 
in life where the man has been worthless as a 
student when a boy. To take these exceptions 
as examples would be as unsafe as it would be to 
advocate blindness because some blind men have 
won undying honor by triumphing over their 
physical infirmity and accomplishing great re- 
sults in the world. I am no advocate of sense- 
less and excessive cramming in studies, but a boy 
should work, and should work hard, at his les- 
sons — in the first place, for the sake of what he 



The American Boy 7 

will learn, and in the next place, for the sake of 
the effect upon his own character of resolutely 
settling down to learn it. Shiftlessness, slack- 
ness, indifference in studying, are almost certain 
to mean inability to get on in other walks of life. 
Of course, as a boy grows older it is a good thing 
if he can shape his studies in the direction toward 
which he has a natural bent; but whether he can 
do this or not, he must put his whole heart into 
them. I do not believe in mischief-doing in 
school hours, or in the kind of animal spirits that 
results in making bad scholars; and I believe 
that those boys who take part in rough, hard 
play outside of school will not find any need for 
horse-play in school. While they study they 
should study just as hard as they play foot-ball 
in a match game. It is wise to obey the homely 
old adage, "Work while you work; play while 
you play." 

A boy needs both physical and moral courage. 
Neither can take the place of the other. When 
boys become men they will find out that there are 
some soldiers very brave in the field who have 
proved timid and worthless as politicians, and 
some politicians who show an entire readiness to 
take chances and assume responsibilities in civil 
affairs, but who lack the fighting edge when op- 
posed to physical danger. In each case, with 



8 The Good Citizen 

soldiers and politicians alike, there is but half a 
virtue. The possession of the courage of the 
soldier does not excuse the lack of courage in the 
statesman, and, even less does the possession of 
the courage of the statesman excuse shrinking on 
the field of battle. Now, this is all just as true 
of boys. A coward who will take a blow with- 
out returning it is a contemptible creature ; but, 
after all, he is hardly as contemptible as the boy 
who dares not stand up for what he deems right 
against the sneers of his companions who are 
themselves wrong. Ridicule is one of the favor- 
ite weapons of wickedness, and it is sometimes 
incomprehensible how good and brave boys will 
be influenced for evil by the jeers of associates 
who have no one quality that calls for respect, 
but who affect to laugh at the very traits which 
ought to be peculiarly the cause for pride. 

There is no need to be a prig. There is no 
need for a boy to preach about his own good 
conduct and virtue. If he does he will make 
himself offensive and ridiculous. But there is ur- 
gent need that he should practise decency; that 
he should be clean and straight, honest and 
truthful, gentle and tender, as well as brave. If 
he can once get to a proper understanding of 
things, he will have a far more hearty contempt 
for the boy who has begun a course of feeble dis- 



The American Boy g 

sipation, or who is untruthful, or mean, or dis- 
honest, or cruel, than this boy and his fellows 
can possibly, in return, feel for him. The very 
fact that the boy should be manly and able to 
hold his own, that he should be ashamed to sub- 
mit to bullying without instant retaliation, 
should, in return, make him abhor any form of 
bullying, cruelty, or brutality. 

The boy can best become a good man by be- 
ing a good boy — not a goody-goody boy, but 
just a plain good boy. I do not mean that he 
must love only the negative virtues; I mean he 
must love the positive virtues also. "Good," in 
the largest sense, should include whatever is fine, 
straightforward, clean, brave, and manly. The 
best boys I know — the best men I know — are 
good at their studies or their business, fearless 
and stalwart, hated and feared by all that is 
wicked and depraved, incapable of submitting 
to wrong-doing, and equally incapable of being 
aught but tender to the weak and helpless. A 
healthy-minded boy should feel hearty contempt 
for the coward, and even more hearty indigna- 
tion for the boy who bullies girls or small boys, 
or tortures animals. One prime reason for ab- 
horring cowards is because every good boy 
should have it in him to thrash the objectionable 
boy as the need arises. 



io The Good Citizen 

Of course the effect that a thoroughly manly, 
thoroughly straight and upright boy can have 
upon the companions of his own age, and upon 
those who are younger, is incalculable. If he is 
not thoroughly manly, then they will not respect 
him, and his good qualities will count for but 
little; while, of course, if he is mean, cruel, or 
wicked, then his physical strength and force of 
mind merely make him so much the more ob- 
jectionable a member of society. He cannot do 
good work if he is not strong and does not try 
with his whole heart and soul to count in any 
contest; and his strength will be a curse to him- 
self and to everyone else if he does not have 
thorough command over himself and over his 
own evil passions, and if he does not use his 
strength on the side of decency, justice, and fair 
dealing. 

In short, in life, as in a foot-ball game, the 
principle to follow is : 

Hit the line hard; don't foul and don't shirk, 
but hit the line hard ! 



THE HERITAGE OF NOBLE DEEDS 

Every American is richer by the heritage of 
the noble deeds and noble words of Washington 
and of Lincoln. Each of us who reads the Get- 
tysburg speech or the second inaugural address 
of the greatest American of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, or who studies the long campaigns and 
lofty statesmanship of that other American who 
was even greater, cannot but feel within him 
that lift toward things higher and nobler which 
can never be bestowed by the enjoyment of mere 
material prosperity. 

It is not only the country which these men 

helped to make and helped to save that is ours 

by inheritance; we inherit also all that is best 

and highest in their characters and in their lives. 

We inherit from Lincoln and from the might of 

Lincoln's generation not merely the freedom of 

those who once were slaves ; for we inherit also 

the fact of the freeing of them, we inherit the 

glory and the honor and the wonder of the deed 

that was done, no less than the actual results of 

the deed when done. The bells that rang at the 

ii 



12 The Good Citizen 

passage of the Emancipation Proclamation still 
ring in Whittier's ode; and as men think over 
the real nature of the triumph then scored for 
humankind their hearts shall ever throb as they 
cannot over the greatest industrial success or 
over any victory won at a less cost than ours. 

The captains and the armies who, after long 
years of dreary campaigning and bloody, stub- 
born fighting, brought to a close the Civil War 
have likewise left us even more than a reunited 
realm. The material effect of what they did is 
shown in the fact that the same flag flies from 
the Great Lakes to the Rio Grande, and all the 
people of the United States are richer because 
they are one people and not many, because they 
belong to one great nation and not to a contemp- 
tible knot of struggling nationalities. But be- 
sides this, besides the material results of the 
Civil War, we are all, North and South, incal- 
culably richer for its memories. We are the 
richer for each grim campaign, for each hard- 
fought battle. We are the richer for valor dis- 
played alike by those who fought so valiantly 
for the right and by those who, no less valiantly, 
fought for what they deemed the right. We 
have in us nobler capacities for what is great and 
good because of the infinite woe and suffering, 
and because of the splendid ultimate triumph. 



The Heritage of Noble Deeds 1 3 

In the same way that we are the better for the 
deeds of our mighty men who have served the 
nation well, so we are the worse for the deeds 
and the words of those who have striven to 
bring evil on the land. Most fortunately we 
have been free from the peril of the most dan- 
gerous of all examples. We have not had to 
fight the influence exerted over the minds of ea- 
ger and ambitious men by the career of the mili- 
tary adventurer who heads some successful rev- 
olutionary or separatist movement. / No man 
works such incalculable woe to a free country 
as he who teaches young men that one of the 
paths to glory, renown, and temporal success lies 
along the line of armed resistance to the Gov- 
ernment, of its attempted overthrow. 

Yet if we are free from the peril of this exam- 
ple, there are other perils from which we are not 
free. All through our career we have had to 
war against a tendency to regard, in the individ- 
ual and the nation alike, as most important, 
things that are of comparatively little impor- 
tance. We rightfully value success, but some- 
times we overvalue it, for we tend to forget that 
success may be obtained by means which should 
make it abhorred and despised by every honora- 
ble man. One section of the community deifies 
as "smartness" the kind of trickery which en- 



14 The Good Citizen 

ables a man without conscience to succeed in the 
financial or political world. Another section of 
the community deifies violent homicidal lawless- 
ness. If ever our people as a whole adopt these 
views, then we shall have proved that we are un- 
worthy of the heritage our forefathers left us; 
and our country will go down in ruin. 

The people that do harm in the end are not 
the wrong-doers whom all execrate ; they are the 
men who do not do quite as much wrong, but 
who are applauded instead of being execrated. 
The career of Benedict Arnold has done us no 
harm as a nation because of the universal horror 
it inspired. The men who have done us harm 
are those who have advocated disunion, but have 
done it so that they have been enabled to keep 
their political position; who have advocated re- 
pudiation of debts, or other financial dishonesty, 
but have kept their standing in the community; 
who preach the doctrines of anarchy, but refrain 
from action that will bring them within the pale 
of the law ; for these men lead thousands astray 
by the fact that they go unpunished or even re- 
warded for their misdeeds. 

It is unhappily true that we inherit the evil as 
well as the good done by those who have gone 
before us, and in the one case as in the other the 
influence extends far beyond the mere material 



The Heritage of Noble Deeds 15 

effects. The foes of order harm quite as much 
by example as by what they actually accomplish. 
So it is with the equally dangerous criminals of 
the wealthy classes. , The conscienceless stock 
speculator who acquires wealth by swindling his 
fellows, by debauching judges and corrupting 
legislatures, and who ends his days with the rep- 
utation of being among the richest men in Amer- 
ica, exerts over the minds of the rising genera- 
tion an influence worse than that of the average 
murderer or bandit, because his career is even 
more dazzling in its success, and even more dan- 
gerous in its effects upon the community. Any 
one who reads the essays of Charles Francis 
Adams and Henry Adams, entitled U A Chapter 
of Erie," and "The Gold Conspiracy in New 
York," will read about the doings of men whose 
influence for evil upon the community is more 
potent than that of any band of anarchists or 
train robbers. 

There are other members of our mercantile 
community who, being perfectly honest them- 
selves, nevertheless do almost as much damage 
as the dishonest. The professional labor agita- 
tor, with all his reckless incendiarism of speech, 
can do no more harm than the narrow, hard, sel- 
fish merchant or manufacturer who deliberately 
sets himself to keep the laborers he employs in 



1 6 The Good Citizen 

a condition of dependence which will render 
them helpless to combine against him ; and every 
such merchant or manufacturer who rises to suf- 
ficient eminence leaves the record of his name 
and deeds as a legacy of evil to all who come 
after him. 

But of course the worst foes of America are 
the foes to that orderly liberty without which our 
Republic must speedily perish. The reckless la- 
bor agitator who arouses the mob to riot and 
bloodshed is in the last analysis the most danger- 
ous of the workingman's enemies. This man is 
a real peril ; and so is his sympathizer, the legis- 
lator, who to catch votes denounces the judiciary 
and the military because they put down mobs. 
We Americans have, on the whole, a right to be 
optimists ; but it is mere folly to blind ourselves 
to the fact that there are some black clouds on 
the horizon of our future. 

There are, however, plenty of wrong-doers 
besides those who commit the overt act. Too 
much cannot be said against the men of wealth 
who sacrifice everything to getting wealth. 
There is not in the world a more ignoble char- 
acter than the mere money-getting American, 
insensible to every duty, regardless of every prin- 
ciple, bent only on amassing a fortune, and put- 
ting his fortune only to the basest uses — whether 



The Heritage of Noble Deeds 1 7 

these uses be to speculate in stocks and wreck 
railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a 
life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross 
debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of 
high social position, foreign or native, for his 
daughter. Such a man is only the more danger- 
ous if he occasionally does some deed like found- 
ing a college or endowing a church, which makes 
those good people who are also foolish forget 
his real iniquity. These men are equally care- 
less of the workingmen, whom they oppress, and 
of the state, whose existence they imperil. There 
are not very many of them, but there is a very 
great number of men who approach more or less 
closely to the type, and, just in so far as they do 
so approach, they are curses to the country. The 
man who is content to let politics go from bad 
to worse, jesting at the corruption of politicians, 
the man who is content to see the maladministra- 
tion of justice without an immediate and resolute 
effort to reform it, is shirking his duty and is pre- 
paring the way for infinite woe in the future. 
Hard, brutal indifference to the right, and an 
equally brutal shortsightedness as to the inevita- 
ble results of corruption and injustice, are bale- 
ful beyond measure ; and yet they are characteris- 
tic of a great many Americans who think them- 
selves perfectly respectable, and who are consid- 



1 8 The Good Citizen 

ered thriving, prosperous men by their easy-go- 
ing fellow-citizens. 

Another class, merging into this, and only less 
dangerous, is that of the men whose ideals are 
purely material. These are the men who are 
willing to go for good government when they 
think it will pay, but who measure everything 
by the shop-till, the people who are unable to ap- 
preciate any quality that is not a mercantile com- 
modity, who do not understand that a poet may 
do far more for a country than the owner of a 
nail factory, who do not realize that no amount 
of commercial prosperity can supply the lack of 
the heroic virtues, or can in itself solve the ter- 
rible social problems which all the civilized 
world is now facing. 

The merely material, the merely commercial 
ideal, the ideal of the men "whose fatherland is 
the till," is in its very essence debasing and low- 
ering. It is as true now as ever it was that no 
man and no nation shall live by bread alone. 
Thrift and industry are indispensable virtues; 
but they are not all-sufficient. We must base 
our appeals for civic and national betterment on 
nobler grounds than those of mere business ex- 
pediency. 

We have examples enough and to spare that 
tend to evil ; nevertheless, for our good fortune, 



The Heritage of Noble Deeds 19 

the men who have most impressed themselves 
upon the thought of the nation have left behind 
them careers the influence of which must tell for 
good. The unscrupulous speculator who rises 
to enormous wealth by swindling his neighbor; 
the capitalist who oppresses the workingman; 
the agitator who wrongs the workingman yet 
more deeply by trying to teach him to rely not 
upon himself, but partly upon the charity of in- 
dividuals or of the state and partly upon mob 
violence; the man in public life who is a dema- 
gogue or corrupt, and the newspaper writer who 
fails to attack him because of his corruption, or 
who slanderously assails him when he is honest; 
the political leader who, cursed by some obliq- 
uity of moral or of mental vision, seeks to pro- 
duce sectional or social strife — all these, though 
important in their day, have hitherto failed to 
leave any lasting impress upon the life of the 
nation. The men who have profoundly influ- 
enced the growth of our national character have 
been in most cases precisely those men whose in- 
fluence was for the best and was strongly felt as 
antagonistic to the worst tendency of the age. 
The great writers, who have written in prose or 
verse, have done much for us. The great ora- 
tors whose burning words on behalf of liberty, 
of union, of honest government, have rung 



20 The Good Citizen 

through our legislative halls, have done even 
more. Most of all has been done by the men 
who have spoken to us through deeds and not 
words, or whose words have gathered their es- 
pecial charm and significance because they came 
from men who did speak in deeds. A nation's 
greatness lies in its possibility of achievement in 
the present, and nothing helps it more than the 
consciousness of achievement in the past. 



THE STRENUOUS LIFE 

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble 
ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the 
life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to 
preach that highest form of success which comes, 
not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but 
to the man who does not shrink from danger, 
from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out 
of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph. 

A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace 
which springs merely from lack either of desire 
or of power to strive after great things, is as lit- 
tle worthy of a nation as of an individual. I ask 
only that what every self-respecting American 
demands from himself and from his sons shall 
be demanded of the American nation as a whole. 
Who among you would teach your boys that ease, 
that peace, is to be the first consideration in their 
eyes — to be the ultimate goal after which they 
strive? You men of Chicago have made this 
city great, you men of Illinois have done your 
share, and more than your share, in making 
America great, because you neither preach nor 

21 



22 The Good Citizen 

practise such a doctrine. You work yourselves, 
and you bring up your sons to work. If you are 
rich and are worth your salt, you will teach your 
sons that though they may have leisure, it is not 
to be spent in idleness; for wisely used leisure 
merely means that those who possess it, being 
free from the necessity of working for their live- 
lihood, are all the more bound to carry on some 
kind of non-remunerative work in science, in let- 
ters, in art, in exploration, in historical research 
— work of the type we most need in this country, 
the successful carrying out of which reflects most 
honor upon the nation. We do not admire the 
man of timid peace. We admire the man who 
embodies victorious effort; the man who never 
wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a 
friend, but who has those virile qualities neces- 
sary to win in the stern strife of actual life. It 
is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried 
to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by 
effort. Freedom from effort in the present 
merely means that there has been stored up ef- 
fort in the past. A man can be freed from the 
necessity of work only by the fact that he or his 
fathers before him have worked to good pur- 
pose. If the freedom thus purchased is used 
aright, and the man still does actual work, 
though of a different kind, whether as a writer or 



The Strenuous Life 23 

a general, whether in the field of politics or in 
the field of exploration and adventure, he shows 
he deserves his good fortune. But if he treats 
this period of freedom from the need of actual 
labor as a period, not of preparation, but of 
mere enjoyment, even though perhaps not of 
vicious enjoyment, he shows that he is simply a 
cumberer of the earth's surface, and he surely 
unfits himself to hold his own with his fellows if 
the need to do so should again arise. A mere 
life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory 
life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately 
unfits those who follow it for serious work in 
the world. 

i In the last analysis a healthy state can exist 
only when the men and women who make it up 
lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when the 
children are so trained that they shall endeav- 
or, not to shirk difficulties, but to overcome 
them; not to seek ease, but to know how to 
wrest triumph from toil and risk. ; The man 
must be glad to do a man's work, to dare and en- 
dure and to labor; to keep himself, and to keep 
those dependent upon him. The woman must 
be the housewife, the helpmeet of the home- 
maker, the wise and fearless mother of many 
healthy children. 

As it is with the individual, so it is with the 



24 The Good Citizen 

nation. It is a base untruth to say that happy 
is the nation that has no history. Thrice happy 
is the nation that has a glorious history. Far 
better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious 
triumphs, even though checkered by failure, 
than to take rank with those poor spirits who 
neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they 
live in the gray twilight that knows not victory 
nor defeat. If in 1861 the men who loved the 
Union had believed that peace was the end of 
all things, and war and strife the worst of all 
things, and had acted up to their belief, we 
would have saved hundreds of thousands of 
lives, we would have saved hundreds of millions 
of dollars. Moreover, besides saving all the 
blood and treasure we then lavished, we would 
have prevented the heartbreak of many women, 
the dissolution of many homes, and we would 
have spared the country those months of gloom 
and shame when it seemed as if our armies 
marched only to defeat. We could have avoided 
all this suffering simply by shrinking from strife. 
And if we had thus avoided it, we would have 
shown that we were weaklings, and that we were 
unfit to stand among the great nations of the 
earth. Thank God for the iron in the blood of 
our fathers, the men who upheld the wisdom of 
Lincoln, and bore sword or rifle in the armies of 



The Strenuous Life 25 

Grant! Let us, the children of the men who 
proved themselves equal to the mighty days, let 
us, the children of the men who carried the great 
Civil War to a triumphant conclusion, praise the 
God of our fathers that the ignoble counsels of 
peace were rejected; that the suffering and loss, 
the blackness of sorrow and despair, were un- 
flinchingly faced, and the years of strife en- 
dured; for in the end the slave was freed, the 
Union restored, and the mighty American re- 
public placed once more as a helmeted queen 
among nations. 

/ We of this generation do not have to face a 
task such as that our fathers faced, but we have 
our tasks, and woe to us if we fail to perform 
them ! We cannot, if we would, play the part 
of China, and be content to rot by inches in igno- 
ble ease within our borders, taking no interest in 
what goes on beyond them, sunk in a scrambling 
commercialism; heedless of the higher life, the 
life of aspiration, of toil and risk, busying our- 
selves only with the wants of our bodies for the 
day, until suddenly we should find, beyond a 
shadow of question, what China has already 
found, that in this world the nation that has 
trained itself to a career of unwarlike and iso- 
lated ease is bound, in the end, to go down be- 
fore other nations which have not lost the manly 



26 The Good Citizen 

and adventurous qualities. If we are to be a 
really great people, we must strive in good faith 
to play a great part in the world. We cannot 
avoid meeting great issues. All that we can de- 
termine for ourselves is whether we shall meet 
them well or ill. In 1898 we could not help be- 
ing brought face to face with the problem of war 
with Spain. All we could decide was whether we 
should shrink like cowards from the contest, or 
enter into it as beseemed a brave and high-spir- 
ited people; and, once in, whether failure or suc- 
cess should crown our banners. So it is now. We 
cannot avoid the responsibilities that confront us 
in Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philip- 
pines. All we can decide is whether we shall 
meet them in a way that will redound to the na- 
tional credit, or whether we shall make of our 
dealings with these new problems a dark and 
shameful page in our history. To refuse to deal 
with them at all merely amounts to dealing with 
them badly. / We have a given problem to solve. 
If we undertake the solution, there is, of course, 
always danger that we may not solve it aright; 
but to refuse to undertake the solution simply 
renders it certain that we cannot possibly solve it 
aright. The timid man, the lazy man, the 
man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized 
man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful 



The Strenuous Life 27 

virtues, the ignorant man, and the man of dull 
mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling the 
mighty lift that thrills "stern men with empires 
in their brains" — all these, of course, shrink 
from seeing the nation undertake its new duties ; 
shrink from seeing us build a navy and an army 
adequate to our needs; shrink from seeing us do 
our share of the world's work, by bringing order 
out of chaos in the great, fair tropic islands 
from which the valor of our soldiers and sailors 
has driven the Spanish flag. These are the men 
who fear the strenuous life, who fear the only 
national life which is really worth leading. 
They believe in that cloistered life which saps 
the hardy virtues in a nation, as it saps them in 
the individual; or else they are wedded to that 
base spirit of gain and greed which recognizes 
in commercialism the be-all and end-all of na- 
tional life, instead of realizing that, though an 
indispensable element, it is, after all, but one of 
the many elements that go to make up true na- 
tional greatness. No country can long endure 
if its foundations are not laid deep in the mate- 
rial prosperity which comes from thrift, from 
business energy and enterprise, from hard, un- 
sparing effort in the fields of industrial activity; 
but neither was any nation ever yet truly great 
if it relied upon material prosperity alone. All 



2& The Good Citizen 

honor must be paid to the architects of our ma- 
terial prosperity, to the great captains of indus- 
try who have built our factories and our rail- 
roads, to the strong men who toil for wealth 
with brain or hand; for great is the debt of the 
nation to these and their kind. But our debt is 
yet greater to the men whose highest type is to 
be found in a statesman like Lincoln, a soldier 
like Grant. They showed by their lives that 
they recognized the law of work, the law of 
strife; they toiled to win a competence for them- 
selves and those dependent upon them ; but they 
recognized that there were yet other and even 
loftier duties — duties to the nation and duties to 
the race. 

f We cannot sit huddled within our own bor- 
ders and avow ourselves merely an assemblage 
of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for 
what happens beyond. Such a policy would de- 
feat even its own end ; for as the nations grow to 
have ever wider and wider interests, and are 
brought into closer and closer contact, if we are 
to hold our own in the struggle for naval and 
commercial supremacy, we must build up our 
power without our own borders. We must 
build the isthmian canal, and we must grasp the 
points of vantage which will enable us to have 



The Strenuous Life 29 

our say in deciding the destiny of the oceans of 
the East and the West. 

I preach to you, then, my countrymen, that 
our country calls not for the life of ease but for 
the life of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth 
century looms before us big with the fate of 
many nations. If we stand idly by, if we seek 
merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, 
if we shrink from the hard contests where men 
must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk 
of all they hold dear, then the bolder and strong- 
er peoples will pass us by, and will win for them- 
selves the domination of the world. Let us 
therefore boldly face the life of strife, resolute 
to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to up- 
hold righteousness by deed and by word; reso- 
lute to be both honest and brave, to serve high 
ideals, yet to use practical methods. Above all, 
let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, 
within or without the nation, provided we are 
certain that the strife is justified, for it is only 
through strife, through hard and dangerous en- 
deavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of 
true national greatness. 



"DOERS OF THE WORD" 

Here near the seat of the summer school for 
young men founded by Dwight L. Moody, I 
naturally speak on a subject suggested to me by 
the life of Mr. Moody and by the aims sought 
for through the establishment of the summer 
school. 

In such a school — a school which is to equip 
young men to do good in the world — to show 
both the desire for the rule of righteousness and 
the practical power to give actual effect to that 
desire — it seems to me there are two texts spe- 
cially worthy of emphasis: One is, "Be ye doers 
of the word and not hearers only" ; and the other 
is, "Not slothful in business, fervent in spirit, 
serving the Lord." A republic of freemen is 
pre-eminently a community in which there is 
need for the actual exercise and practical appli- 
cation of both the milder and the stronger virt- 
ues. Every good quality — every virtue and 
every grace — has its place and is of use in the 
great scheme of creation; but it is of course a 
mere truism to say that at certain times and in 

30 



The Good Citizen 31 

certain places there is pre-eminent need for a 
given set of virtues. In our own country, with 
its many-sided, hurrying, practical life, the place 
for cloistered virtue is far smaller than is the 
place for that essential manliness which, without 
losing its fine and lofty side, can yet hold its own 
in the rough struggle with the forces of the 
world round about us. It would be a very bad 
thing for this country if it happened that the 
men of righteous living tended to lose the ro- 
bust, virile qualities of heart, mind, and body, 
and if, on the other hand, the men best fitted 
practically to achieve results lost the guidance of 
the moral law. No one-sided development can 
produce really good citizenship — as good citi- 
zenship is needed in the America of to-day. 
If a man has not in him the root of righteousness 
— if he does not believe in, and practise, honesty 
— if he is not truthful and upright, clean and 
high-minded, fair in his dealings both at home 
and abroad — then the stronger he is, the abler 
and more energetic he is, the more dangerous he 
is to the body politic. Wisdom untempered by 
devotion to an ideal usually means only that dan- 
gerous cunning which is far more fatal in its ulti- 
mate effects to the community than open violence 
itself. It is inexcusable in an honest people to 
deify mere success without regard to the quali- 



32 " Doers of the Word" 

ties by which that success is achieved. Indeed 
there is a revolting injustice, intolerable to just 
minds, in punishing the weak scoundrel who 
fails, and bowing down to and making life easy 
for the far more dangerous scoundrel who suc- 
ceeds. A wicked man who is wicked on a large 
scale, whether in business or in politics, of 
course does many times more evil to the com- 
munity than the man who only ventures to be 
wicked furtively and in lesser ways. If possible, 
the success of such a man should be prevented 
by law, and in any event he ought to be made to 
feel that there is no condonation of his offences 
by the public. There is no more unpleasant 
manifestation of public feeling than the deifica- 
tion of mere "smartness," as it is termed — of 
mere successful cunning unhampered by scruple 
or generosity or right feeling. If a man is not 
decent, is not square and honest, then the posses- 
sion of ability only serves to render him more 
dangerous to the community; as a wild beast 
grows more dangerous the stronger and fiercer 
he is. 

But virtue by itself is not enough, or anything 
like enough. Strength must be added to it, and 
the determination to use that strength. The 
good man who is ineffective is not able to make 
his goodness of much account to the people as a 



The Good Citizen 33 

whole. No matter how much a man hears the 
word, small is the credit attached to him if he 
fails to be a doer also; and in serving the Lord 
he must remember that he needs to avoid sloth 
in his business as well as to cultivate fervency of 
spirit. All around us there are great evils to 
combat, and they are not to be combated with 
success by men who pride themselves on their su- 
periority in taste and in virtue, and draw aside 
from the world's life. It matters not whether 
they thus draw aside because they fear their fel- 
lows or because they despise them. Each feeling 
— the fear no less than the contempt — is shame- 
ful and unworthy. A man to be a good Ameri- 
can must be straight, and he must also be strong. 
He must have in him the conscience which will 
teach him to see the right, and he must also have 
the vigor, the courage, and the practical, hard- 
headed common-sense which will enable him to 
make his seeing right result in some benefit to 
his fellows. — Speech at Northfield, Mass., Sep- 
tember 1, 1902. 



THE PIONEER 



THE PIONEER 

For a century after the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence the greatest work of our people, with 
the exception only of the work of self-preserva- 
tion under Lincoln, was the work of the pioneers 
as they took possession of this continent. Dur- 
ing that century we pushed westward from the 
Alleghanies to the Pacific, southward to the 
Gulf and the Rio Grande, and also took posses- 
sion of Alaska. The work of advancing our 
boundary, of pushing the frontier across forest 
and desert and mountain chain, was the great 
typical work of our nation ; and the men who did 
it — the frontiersmen, the pioneers, the back- 
woodsmen, plainsmen, mountain men — formed 
a class by themselves. It was an iron task, 
which none but men of iron soul and iron body 
could do. The men who carried it to a success- 
ful conclusion had characters strong alike for 
good and for evil. Their rugged natures made 
them powers who served light or darkness with 
fierce intensity; and together with heroic traits 
they had those evil and dreadful tendencies 

37 



38 The Pioneer 

whicH are but too apt to be found in characters 
of heroic possibilities. Such men make the most 
efficient servants of the Lord if their abounding 
vitality and energy are directed aright; and if 
misdirected their influence is equally potent 
against the cause of Christianity and true civili- 
zation. In the hard and cruel life of the border, 
with its grim struggle against the forbidding 
forces of wild nature and wilder men, there was 
much to pull the frontiersman down. If left to 
himself, without moral teaching and moral 
guidance, without any of the influences that tend 
toward the uplifting of man and the subduing of 
the brute within him, sad would have been his, 
and therefore our, fate. From this fate we have 
been largely rescued by the fact that together 
with the rest of the pioneers went the pioneer 
preachers ; and all honor be given to the Metho- 
dists for the great proportion of these pioneer 
preachers whom they furnished. 

These preachers were of the stamp of old 
Peter Cartwright — men who suffered and over- 
came every hardship in common with their flock, 
and who in addition tamed the wild and fierce 
spirits of their fellow-pioneers. It was not a 
task that could have been accomplished by men 
desirous to live in the soft places of the earth 
and to walk easily on life's journey. They had 



The Pioneer 39 

to possess the spirit of the martyrs; but not of 
martyrs who could merely suffer, not of martyrs 
who could oppose only passive endurance to 
wrong. The pioneer preachers warred against 
the forces of spiritual evil with the same fiery 
zeal and energy that they and their fellows 
showed in the conquest of the rugged continent. 
They had in them the heroic spirit, the spirit 
that scorns ease if it must be purchased by fail- 
ure to do duty, the spirit that courts risk and a 
life of hard endeavor if the goal to be reached 
is really worth attaining. Great is our debt to 
these men and scant the patience we need show 
toward their critics. At times they seemed hard 
and narrow to those whose training and sur- 
roundings had saved them from similar tempta- 
tions; and they have been criticised, as all men, 
whether missionaries, soldiers, explorers, or 
frontier settlers, are criticised when they go 
forth to do the rough work that must inevitably 
be done by those who act as the first harbingers, 
the first heralds, of civilization in the world's 
dark places. It is easy for those who stay at 
home in comfort, who never have to see human- 
ity in the raw, or to strive against the dreadful 
naked forces which appear clothed, hidden, and 
subdued in civilized life — it is easy for such to 
criticise the men who, in rough fashion, and 



4-0 The Pioneer 

amid grim surroundings, make ready the way 
for the higher life that is to come afterward; but 
let us all remember that the untempted and the 
effortless should be cautious in passing too heavy 
judgment upon their brethren who may show 
hardness, who may be guilty of shortcomings, 
but who nevertheless do the great deeds by 
which mankind advances. These pioneers of 
Methodism had the strong, militant virtues 
which go to the accomplishment of such great 
deeds. Now and then they betrayed the short- 
comings natural to men of their type; but their 
shortcomings seem small indeed when we place 
beside them the magnitude of the work they 
achieved. 

And now, friends, in celebrating the wonder- 
ful growth of Methodism, in rejoicing at the 
good it has done to the country and to mankind, 
I need hardly ask a body like this to remember 
that the greatness of the fathers becomes to the 
children a shameful thing if they use it only as 
an excuse for inaction instead of as a spur to ef- 
fort for noble aims. I speak to you not only as 
Methodists — I speak to you as American citi- 
zens. The pioneer days are over. We now all 
of us form parts of a great civilized nation, with 
a complex industrial and social life and infinite 
possibilities both for good and for evil. The 



The Pioneer 41 

instruments with which, and the surroundings in 
which, we work, have changed immeasurably 
from what they were in the days when the rough 
backwoods preachers ministered to the moral 
and spiritual needs of their rough backwoods 
congregations. But if we are to succeed, the 
spirit in which we do our work must be the same 
as the spirit in which they did theirs. These 
men drove forward, and fought their way up- 
ward, to success, because their sense of duty was 
in their hearts, in the very marrow of their 
bones. It was not with them something to be 
considered as a mere adjunct to their theology, 
standing separate and apart from their daily 
life. They had it with them week days as well 
as Sundays. They did not divorce the spiritual 
from the secular. They did not have one kind 
of conscience for one side of their lives and an- 
other for another. 

If we are to succeed as a nation we must have 
the same spirit in us. We must be absolutely 
practical, of course, and must face facts as they 
are. The pioneer preachers of Methodism 
could not have held their own for a fortnight if 
they had not shown an intense practicability of 
spirit, if they had not possessed the broadest and 
deepest sympathy for, and understanding of, 
their fellow-men. But in addition to the hard, 



42 The Pioneer 

practical common-sense needed by each of us in 
life, we must have a lift toward lofty things or 
we shall be lost, individually and collectively, as 
a nation. Life is not easy, and least of all is it 
easy for either the man or the nation that aspires 
to do great deeds. In the century opening, the 
play of the infinitely far-reaching forces and 
tendencies which go to make up our social system 
bids fair to be even fiercer in its activity than in 
the century which has just closed. If during this 
century the men of high and fine moral sense 
show themselves weaklings; if they possess only 
that cloistered virtue which shrinks shuddering 
from contact with the raw facts of actual life; if 
they dare not go down into the hurly-burly where 
the men of might contend for the mastery; if 
they stand aside from the pressure and conflict; 
then as surely as the sun rises and sets all of our 
great material progress, all the multiplication of 
the physical agencies which tend for our comfort 
and enjoyment, will go for naught and our civili- 
zation will become a brutal sham and mockery. 
If we are to do as I believe we shall and will do, 
if we are to advance in broad humanity, in kind- 
liness, in the spirit of brotherhood, exactly as we 
advance in our conquest over the hidden forces 
of nature, it must be by developing strength in 
virtue and virtue in strength, by breeding and 



The Pioneer 43 

training men who shall be both good and 
strong, both gentle and valiant — men who 
scorn wrong-doing, and who at the same time 
have both the courage and the strength to 
strive mightily for the right. Wesley ac- 
complished so much for mankind because he 
refused to leave the stronger, manlier qualities 
to be availed of only in the interest of evil. 
The Church he founded has through its career 
been a Church for the poor as well as for the 
rich, and has known no distinction of persons. 
It has been a Church whose members, if true to 
the teachings of its founder, have sought for no 
greater privilege than to spend and be spent in 
the interest of the higher life, who have prided 
themselves, not on shirking rough duty, but on 
undertaking it and carrying it to a successful con- 
clusion. — Speech at the Bi-Centennial Celebra- 
tion of the Birth of John Wesley, New York, 
February 26, 1903. 



FRONTIER CHARACTER 

In the strongly marked frontier character no 
traits were more pronounced than the dislike of 
crowding and the tendency to roam to and fro, 
hither and thither, always with a westward trend. 
Boone, the typical frontiersman, embodied in his 
own person the spirit of loneliness and restless- 
ness which marked the first venturers into the 
wilderness. He had wandered in his youth from 
Pennsylvania to Carolina, and, in the prime of 
his strength, from North Carolina to Kentucky. 
When Kentucky became well settled in the clos- 
ing years of the century, he crossed into Mis- 
souri, that he might once more take up his life 
where he could see the game come out of the 
woods at nightfall, and could wander among 
trees untouched by the axe of the pioneer. An 
English traveller of note who happened to en- 
counter him about this time has left an interest- 
ing account of the meeting. It was on the Ohio, 
and Boone was in a canoe, alone with his dog 
and gun, setting forth on a solitary trip into the 
wilderness to trap beaver. He would not even 

44 



Frontier Character 45 

join himself to the other travellers for a night, 
preferring to plunge at once into the wild, lonely 
life he so loved. His strong character and keen 
mind struck the Englishman, who yet saw that 
the old hunter belonged to the class of pioneers 
who could never themselves civilize the land, be- 
cause they ever fled from the face of the very civ- 
ilization for which they had made ready the 
land. In Boone's soul the fierce impatience of all 
restraint burned like a fire. He told the English- 
man that he no longer cared for Kentucky, be- 
cause its people had grown too easy of life; and 
that he wished to move to some place where men 
still lived untrammelled and unshackled and en- 
joyed uncontrolled the free blessings of nature. 
The isolation of his life and the frequency with 
which he changed his abode brought out the 
frontiersman's wonderful capacity to shift for 
himself, but it hindered the development of his 
power of acting in combination with others of 
his kind. The first comers to the new country 
were so restless and so intolerant of the presence 
of their kind, that as neighbors came in they 
moved ever westward. They could not act with 
their fellows. 

Of course in the men who succeeded the first 
pioneers, and who were the first permanent set- 
tlers, the restlessness and the desire for a lonely 



46 The Pioneer 

life were much less developed. These men 
wandered only until they found a good piece of 
land, and took up claims on this land, not 
because the country was lonely, but because 
it was fertile. They hailed with joy the 
advent of new settlers and the upbuilding of a 
little market town in the neighborhood. They 
joined together eagerly in the effort to ob- 
tain schools for their children. As yet there 
were no public schools supported by govern- 
ment in any part of the West, but all the set- 
tlers of any pretension to respectability were 
anxious to give their children a decent education. 
Even the poorer people, who were still engaged 
in the hardest and roughest struggle for a liveli- 
hood, showed appreciation of the need of school- 
ing for their children; and wherever the clear- 
ings of the settlers were within reasonable dis- 
tance of one another a log school-house was sure 
to spring up. The school-teacher boarded 
around among the different families, and was 
quite as apt to be paid in produce as in cash. 
Sometimes he was a teacher by profession; more 
often he took up teaching simply as an interlude 
to some of his other occupations. School-books 
were more common than any others in the scanty 
libraries of the pioneers. 

The settlers who became firmly established in 



Frontier Character 47 

the land gave definite shape to its political ca- 
reer. The county was throughout the West the 
unit of division, though in the North it became 
somewhat mixed with the township system. It 
is a pity that the township could not have been 
the unit, as it would have rendered the social and 
political development in many respects easier, 
by giving to each little community responsibility 
for, and power in, matters concerning its own 
welfare; but the backwoodsmen lived so scat- 
tered out, and the thinly settled regions covered 
so large an extent of territory, that the county 
was at first in some ways more suited to their 
needs. Moreover, it was the unit of organiza- 
tion in Virginia, to which State more than to 
any other the pioneers owed their social and 
governmental system. The people were ordi- 
narily brought but little in contact with the gov- 
ernment. They were exceedingly jealous of 
their individual liberty, and wished to be inter- 
fered with as little as possible. Nevertheless, 
they were fond of litigation. One observer re- 
marks that horses and lawsuits were their great 
subjects of conversation. 

The vast extent of the territory and the scan- 
tiness of the population forced the men of law, 
like the religious leaders, to travel about rather 
than stay permanently fixed in any one place, 



48 The Pioneer 

In the few towns there were lawyers and clergy- 
men who had permanent homes; but as a rule 
both rode circuits. The judges and the lawyers 
travelled together on the circuits to hold court. 
At the Shire-town all might sleep in one room, 
or at least under one roof; and it was far from 
an unusual thing to see both the grand and petty 
juries sitting under trees in the open. 

The fact that the government did so little for 
the individual and left so much to be done by 
him rendered it necessary for the individuals 
voluntarily to combine. Huskings and nouse- 
raisings were times when all joined freely to 
work for the man whose corn was to be shucked 
or whose log-cabin was to be built, and turned 
their labor into a frolic and merry-making, 
where the men drank much whiskey and the 
young people danced vigorously to the sound of 
the fiddle. Such merry-makings were attended 
from far and near, offering a most welcome 
break to the dreariness of life on the lonely 
clearings in the midst of the forest. Ordinarily 
the frontiersman at his home only drank milk 
or water; but at the taverns and social gather- 
ings there was much drunkenness, for the men 
craved whiskey, drinking the fiery liquor in huge 
draughts. Often the orgies ended with brutal 
brawls. To outsiders the craving of the back- 



Frontier Character 49 

woodsman for whiskey was one of his least at- 
tractive traits. It must always be remembered, 
however, that even the most friendly outsider is 
apt to apply to others his own standards in mat- 
ters of judgment. The average traveller over- 
stated the drunkenness of the backwoodsman, 
exactly as he overstated his misery. 

The frontiersman was very poor. He 
worked hard and lived roughly, and he and his 
family had little beyond coarse food, coarse 
clothing, and a rude shelter. In the severe win- 
ters they suffered both from cold and hunger. In 
the summers there was sickness everywhere, fe- 
vers of various kinds scourging all the new set- 
tlements. The difficulty of communication was 
so great that it took three months for the emi- 
grants to travel from Connecticut to the West- 
ern Reserve near Cleveland, and a journey from 
a clearing, over the forest roads, to a little town 
not fifty miles off, was an affair of moment to be 
undertaken but once a year. Yet to the fron- 
tiersmen themselves the life was far from unat- 
tractive. It gratified their intense love of inde- 
pendence; the lack of refinement did not grate 
on their rough, bold natures; and they prized 
the entire equality of a life where there were no 
social distinctions, and few social restraints. 
Game was still a staple, being sought after for 



5<D The Pioneer 

the flesh and the hide, and of course all the men 
and boys were enthralled by the delights of the 
chase. The life was as free as it was rude, and 
it possessed great fascinations, not only for the 
wilder spirits, but even for many men who, 
when they had the chance, showed that they pos- 
sessed ability to acquire cultivation. 

One old pioneer has left a pleasant account 
of the beginning of an ordinary day's work in a 
log cabin [Drake's "Pioneer Life in Ken- 
tucky"] : "I know of no scene in civilized life 
more primitive than such a cabin hearth as that 
of my mother. In the morning, a buckeye back- 
log, a hickory forestick, resting on stone and 
irons, with a johnny-cake, on a clean ash board, 
set before the fire to bake ; a frying pan, with its 
long handle resting on a split-bottom turner's 
chair, sending out its peculiar music, and the tea- 
kettle swung from a wooden lug pole, with my- 
self setting the table or turning the meat, or 
watching the johnny-cake, while she sat nursing 
the baby in the corner and telling the little ones 
to hold still and let their sister Lizzie dress 
them. Then came blowing the conch-shell for 
father in the field, the howling of old Lion, the 
gathering round the table, the blessing, the dull 
clatter of pewter spoons and pewter basins, the 
talk about the crop and stock, the inquiry wheth- 



Frontier Character 51 

er Dan'l (the boy) could be spared from the 
house, and the general arrangements for the 
day. Breakfast over, my function was to pro- 
vide the sauce for dinner; in winter, to open the 
potato or turnip hole, and wash what I took out; 
in spring, to go into the field and collect the 
greens ; in summer and fall, to explore the truck 
patch, our little garden. If I afterward went 
to the field my household labors ceased until 
night; if not, they continued through the day. 
As often as possible mother would engage in 
making pumpkin pies, in which I generally bore 
a part, and one of these more commonly graced 
the supper than the dinner-table. My pride was 
in the labors of the field. Mother did the spin- 
ning. The standing dyestuff was the inner 
bark of the white walnut, from which we ob- 
tained that peculiar and permanent shade of dull 
yellow, the butternut [so common and typical 
in the clothing of the backwoods farmer]. Oak 
bark, with copperas as a mordant, when father 
had money to purchase it, supplied the ink with 
which I learned to write. I drove the horses to 
and from the range, and salted them. I tended 
the sheep, and hunted up the cattle in the 
woods." This was the life of the thrifty pio- 
neers, whose children more than held their own 
in the world. The shiftless men without ambi- 



52 The Pioneer 

tion and without thrift, lived in laziness and 
filth; their eating and sleeping arrangements 
were as unattractive as those of an Indian wig- 
wam. 

The pleasures and the toils of the life were 
alike peculiar. In the wilder parts the loneli- 
ness and the fierce struggle with squalid pover- 
ty, and with the tendency to revert to savage 
conditions inevitably produced for a generation 
or two a certain falling off from the standard of 
civilized communities. It needed peculiar quali- 
ties to insure success, and the pioneers were al- 
most exclusively native Americans. The Ger- 
mans were more thrifty and prosperous, but 
they could not go first into the wilderness. Men 
fresh from England rarely succeeded. The 
most pitiable group of emigrants that reached 
the West at this time was formed by the French 
who came to found the town of Gallipolis, on 
the Ohio. These were mostly refugees from 
the Revolution, who had been taken in by a 
swindling land company. They were utterly 
unsuited to life in the wilderness, being gentle- 
men, small tradesmen, lawyers, and the like. 
Unable to grapple with the wild life into which 
they found themselves plunged, they sank into 
shiftless poverty, not one in fifty showing in- 
dustry and capacity to succeed. Congress took 



Frontier Character 53 

pity upon them and granted them twenty-four 
thousand acres in Scioto County, the tract being 
known as the French grant ; but no gift of wild 
land was able to insure their prosperity. By de- 
grees they were absorbed into the neighboring 
communities, a few succeeding, most ending 
their lives in abject failure. 

The troubles these poor French settlers had 
with their lands was far from unique. The 
early system of land sales in the West was most 
unwise. In Kentucky and Tennessee the grants 
were made under the laws of Virginia and 
North Carolina, and each man purchased or pre- 
empted whatever he could, and surveyed it where 
he liked, with a consequent endless confusion of 
titles. The National Government possessed the 
disposal of the land in the Northwest and in 
Mississippi; and it avoided the pitfall of un- 
limited private surveying; but it made little ef- 
fort to prevent swindling by land companies, 
and none whatever to people the country with 
actual settlers. Congress granted great tracts 
of lands to companies and to individuals, sell- 
ing to the highest bidder, whether or not he in- 
tended personally to occupy the country. Pub- 
lic sales were thus conducted by competition, 
and Congress even declined to grant to the men 
in actual possession the right of pre-emption at 



54 The Pioneer 

the average rate of sale, refusing the request of 
settlers in both Mississippi and Indiana that 
they should be given the first choice to the lands 
which they had already partially cleared. It 
was not until many years later that we adopted 
the wise policy of selling the national domain in 
small lots to actual occupants. 

The pioneer in his constant struggle with 
poverty was prone to look with puzzled anger 
at those who made more money than he did, 
and whose lives were easier. The backwoods 
farmer or planter of that day looked upon the 
merchant with much the same suspicion and hos- 
tility now felt by his successor for the banker or 
the railroad magnate. He did not quite under- 
stand how it was that the merchant, who seemed 
to work less hard than he did, should make more 
money; and being ignorant and suspicious, he 
usually followed some hopelessly wrong-headed 
course when he tried to remedy his wrongs. 
Sometimes these efforts to obtain relief took 
the form of resolutions not to purchase from 
merchants or traders such articles as woollens, 
linens, cottons, hats, or shoes, unless the same 
could be paid for in articles grown or manufact- 
ured by the farmers themselves. This particu- 
lar move was taken because of the alarming 
scarcity of money, and was aimed particularly 



Frontier Character 55 

at the inhabitants of the Atlantic States. It was 
of course utterly ineffective. A much less wise 
and less honest course was that sometimes fol- 
lowed of refusing to pay debts when the latter 
became inconvenient and pressing. 

The frontier virtue of independence and of 
impatience of outside direction found a particu- 
larly vicious expression in the frontier abhor- 
rence of regular troops, and advocacy of a 
hopelessly feeble militia system. The people 
were foolishly convinced of the efficacy of 
their militia system, which they loudly pro- 
claimed to be the only proper mode of national 
defence. While in the actual presence of the 
Indians the stern necessities of border warfare 
forced the frontiersmen into a certain semblance 
of discipline. As soon as the immediate pres- 
sure was relieved, however, the whole militia 
system sank into a mere farce. 

The extreme individualism of the frontier, 
which found expression for good and for evil 
both in its governmental system in time of peace 
and in its military system in time of war, was 
also shown in religious matters. In 1799 and 
1800 a great revival of religion swept over the 
West. Up to that time the Presbyterian had 
been the leading creed beyond the mountains. 
There were a few Episcopalians here and there, 



56 The Pioneer 

and there were Lutherans, Catholics, and adher- 
ents of the Reformed Dutch and German 
churches ; but, aside from the Presbyterians, the 
Methodists and Baptists were the only sects 
powerfully represented. The great revival of 
1799 was mainly carried on by Methodists and 
Baptists, and under their guidance the Metho- 
dist and Baptist churches at once sprang to the 
front and became the most important religious 
forces in the frontier communities. The Pres- 
byterian Church remained the most prominent 
as regards the wealth and social standing of its 
adherents, but the typical frontiersman who pro- 
fessed religion at all became either a Methodist 
or a Baptist, adopting a creed which was in- 
tensely democratic and individualistic, which 
made nothing of social distinctions, which dis- 
trusted educated preachers, and worked under a 
republican form of ecclesiastical government. 



DANIEL BOONE 

Among the pioneer hunters one arose whose 
wanderings were to bear fruit; who was destined 
to lead through the wilderness the first body of 
settlers that ever established a community in the 
far West, completely cut off from the seaboard 
colonies. This was Daniel Boone. He was 
born in Pennsylvania in 1734,* but when only a 
boy had been brought with the rest of his fam- 
ily to the banks of the Yadkin in North Caro- 
lina. Here he grew up, and as soon as he came 
of age he married, built a log hut, and made a 
clearing, whereon to farm like the rest of his 
backwoods neighbors. They all tilled their own 
clearings, guiding the plough among the charred 
stumps left when the trees were chopped down 
and the land burned over, and they were all, as 
a matter of course, hunters. With Boone hunt- 
ing and exploration were passions, and the lone- 
ly life of the wilderness, with its bold, wild free- 

* August 22, 1734 (according to James Parton, in his sketch of Boone). 
His grandfather was an English immigrant ; his father had married a 
Quakeress. When he lived on the banks of the Delaware, the country 
was still a wilderness. He was born in Berks County. 

57 



58 The Pioneer 

dom, the only existence for which he really 
cared. He was a tall, spare, sinewy man, with 
eyes like an eagle's, and muscles that never 
tired; the toil and hardship of his life made no 
impress on his iron frame, unhurt by intemper- 
ance of any kind, and he lived for eighty-six 
years, a backwoods hunter to the end of his 
days. His thoughtful, quiet, pleasant face, so 
often portrayed, is familiar to every one ; it was 
the face of a man who never blustered or bul- 
lied, who would neither inflict nor suffer any 
wrong, and who had a limitless fund of forti- 
tude, endurance, and indomitable resolution 
upon which to draw when fortune proved ad- 
verse. His self-command and patience, his dar- 
ing, restless love of adventure, and, in time of 
danger, his absolute trust in his own powers and 
resources, all combined to render him peculiarly 
fitted to follow the career of which he was so 
fond. 

Boone hunted on the Western waters at an 
early date. In the valley of Boone's Creek, a 
tributary of the Watauga, there is a beech-tree 
still standing, on which can be faintly traced an 
inscription setting forth that "D. Boone cilled 
a bar on (this) tree in the year 1760." On the 
expeditions of which this is the earliest record 
he was partly hunting on his own account, and 





STry^c 



Engraved by J. B. Longacre, from an original painting by C. Harding. 



Daniel Boone 59 

partly exploring on behalf of another, Richard 
Henderson. Henderson was a prominent citi- 
zen of North Carolina, a speculative man of 
great ambition and energy. He stood high in 
the colony, was extravagant and fond of dis- 
play, and his fortune being jeopardized he 
hoped to more than retrieve it by going into 
speculations in Western lands on an unheard of 
scale; for he intended to try to establish on his 
own account a great proprietary colony beyond 
the mountains. He had great confidence in 
Boone ; and it was his backing which enabled the 
latter to turn his discoveries to such good ac- 
count. 

Boone's claim to distinction rests not so much 
on his wide wanderings in unknown lands, for 
in this respect he did little more than was done 
by a hundred other backwoods hunters of his 
generation, but on the fact that he was able to 
turn his daring woodcraft to the advantage of 
his fellows. As he himself said, he was an in- 
strument "ordained of God to settle the wilder- 
ness." He inspired confidence in all who met 
him, so that the men of means and influence were 
willing to trust adventurous enterprises to his 
care; and his success as an explorer, his skill as 
a hunter, and his prowess as an Indian fighter, 
enabled him to bring these enterprises to a sue- 



60 The Pioneer 

cessful conclusion, and in some degree to control 
the wild spirits associated with him. 

Boone's expeditions into the edges of the wil- 
derness whetted his appetite for the unknown. 
He had heard of great hunting-grounds in 
the far interior from a stray hunter and Indian 
trader, who had himself seen them, and on May 
i, 1769, he left his home on the Yadkin "to 
wander through the wilderness of America in 
quest of the country of Kentucky." He was ac- 
companied by five other men, including his in- 
formant, and struck out toward the Northwest, 
through the tangled mass of rugged mountains 
and gloomy forests. During five weeks of se- 
vere toil the little band journeyed through vast 
solitudes, whose utter loneliness can with diffi- 
culty be understood by those who have not them- 
selves dwelt and hunted in primeval mountain 
forests. Then, early in June, the adventurers 
broke through the interminable wastes of dim 
woodland, and stood on the threshold of the 
beautiful blue-grass region of Kentucky; a land 
of running waters, of groves and glades, of prai- 
ries, cane-brakes, and stretches of lofty forest. 
It was teeming with game. The shaggy-maned 
herds of unwieldy buffalo — the bison as they 
should be called — had beaten out broad roads 
through the forest, and had furrowed the prai- 



Daniel Boone 61 

ries with trails along which they had travelled 
for countless generations. The round-horned 
elk, with spreading, massive antlers, the lord- 
liest of the deer tribe throughout the world, 
abounded, and like the buffalo travelled in bands 
not only through the woods but also across the 
reaches of waving grass land. The deer were 
extraordinarily numerous and so were bears, 
while wolves and panthers were plentiful. 
Wherever there was a salt spring the country 
was fairly thronged with wild beasts of many 
kinds. For six months Boone and his compan- 
ions enjoyed such hunting as had hardly fallen 
to men of their race since the Germans came out 
of the Hercynian forest. 

In December, however, they were attacked 
by Indians. Boone and a companion were capt- 
ured; and when they escaped they found their 
camp broken up, and the rest of the party scat- 
tered and gone home. About this time they 
were joined by Squire Boone, the brother of the 
great hunter, and himself a woodsman of but 
little less skill, together with another adventur- 
er; the two had travelled through the immense 
wilderness, partly to explore it and partly with 
the hope of finding the original adventurers, 
which they finally succeeded in doing more by 
good luck than design. Soon afterward 



62 The Pioneer 

Boone's companion in his first short captivity 
was again surprised by the Indians, and this 
time was slain — the first of the thousands of hu- 
man beings with whose life-blood Kentucky was 
bought. The attack was entirely unprovoked. 
The Indians had wantonly shed the first blood. 
The land belonged to no one tribe, but was 
hunted over by all, each feeling jealous of every 
other intruder; they attacked the whites, not be- 
cause the whites had wronged them, but because 
their invariable policy was to kill any strangers 
on any grounds over which they themselves ever 
hunted, no matter what man had the best right 
thereto. The Kentucky hunters were promptly 
taught that in this no-man's-land, teeming with 
game and lacking even a solitary human habita- 
tion, every Indian must be regarded as a foe. 

The man who had accompanied Squire Boone 
was terrified by the presence of the Indians, and 
now returned to the settlements. The two 
brothers remained alone on their hunting- 
grounds throughout the winter, living in a little 
cabin. About the first of May Squire set off 
alone to the settlements to procure horses and 
ammunition. For three months Daniel Boone 
remained absolutely alone in the wilderness, 
without salt, sugar, or flour, and without the 
companionship of so much as a horse or a dog. 



Daniel Boone 63 

But the solitude-loving hunter, dauntless and 
self-reliant, enjoyed to the full his wild, lonely 
life; he passed his days hunting and exploring, 
wandering hither and thither over the country, 
while at night he lay off in the cane-brakes or 
thickets, without a fire, so as not to attract the 
Indians. Of the latter he saw many signs, and 
they sometimes came to his camp, but his sleep- 
less wariness enabled him to avoid capture. 

Late in July his brother returned, and met 
him, according to appointment, at the old camp. 
Other hunters also now came into the Kentucky 
wilderness, and Boone joined a small party of 
them for a short time. Such a party of hunters 
is always glad to have anything wherewith to 
break the irksome monotony of the long even- 
ings passed round the camp-fire ; and a book or 
a greasy pack of cards was as welcome in a camp 
of Kentucky riflemen in 1770 as it was to a party 
of Rocky Mountain hunters in 1888. Boone 
has recorded in his own quaint phraseology an 
incident of his life during this summer, which 
shows how eagerly such a little band of fron- 
tiersmen read a book, and how real its charac- 
ters became to their minds. He was encamped 
with five other men on Red River, and they had 
with them for their "amusement the history of 
Samuel Gulliver's travels, wherein he gave an 



64 The Pioneer 

account of his young master, Glumdelick, care- 
ing [sic] him on a market day for a show to a 
town called Lulbegrud." In the party who, 
amid such strange surroundings, read and lis- 
tened to Dean Swift's writings was a young man 
named Alexander Neely. One night he came 
into camp with two Indian scalps, taken from a 
Shawnese village he had found on a creek run- 
ning into the river; and he announced to the cir- 
cle of grim wilderness veterans that "he had 
been that day to Lulbegrud, and had killed two 
Brobdignags in their capital." To this day the 
creek by which the two luckless Shawnees lost 
their lives is known as Lulbegrud Creek. 

Soon after this encounter the increasing dan- 
ger from the Indians drove Boone back to the 
valley of the Cumberland River, and in the 
spring of 177 1 he returned to his home on the 
Yadkin. 

A couple of years before Boone went to Ken- 
tucky, Steiner, or Stoner, and Harrod, two 
hunters from Pittsburg, who had passed 
through the Illinois, came down to hunt in the 
bend of the Cumberland, where Nashville now 
stands; they found vast numbers of buffalo, and 
killed a great many, especially around the licks, 
where the huge clumsy beasts had fairly de- 
stroyed most of the forest, treading down the 



Daniel Boone 65 

young trees and bushes till the ground was left 
bare or covered with a rich growth of clover. 
The bottoms and the hollows between the hills 
were thickset with cane. Sycamore grew in the 
low ground, and toward the Mississippi were 
to be found the persimmon and cottonwood. 
Sometimes the forest was open and composed of 
huge trees; elsewhere it was of thicker, smaller 
growth. Everywhere game abounded, and it 
was nowhere very wary. 

Other hunters of whom we know even the 
names of only a few, had been through many 
parts of the wilderness before Boone, and ear- 
lier still Frenchmen had built forts and smelt- 
ing-furnaces on the Cumberland, the Tennessee, 
and the head tributaries of the Kentucky. 
Boone is interesting as a leader and explorer; 
but he is still more interesting as a type. The 
West was neither discovered, won, nor settled 
by any single man. No keen-eyed statesman 
planned the movement, nor was it carried out by 
any great military leader; it was the work of a 
whole people, of whom each man was impelled 
mainly by sheer love of adventure; it was the 
outcome of the ceaseless strivings of all the 
dauntless, restless backwoods folk to win homes 
for their descendants and to each penetrate 
deeper than his neighbors into the remote forest 



66 The Pioneer 

hunting-grounds where the perilous pleasures of 
the chase and of war could be best enjoyed. We 
owe the conquest of the West to all the back- 
woodsmen, not to any solitary individual among 
them; where all alike were strong and daring 
there was no chance for any single man to rise 
to unquestioned pre-eminence. 



THE HERO 



THE TRUE BASIS OF HEROISM 

Here, where we meet to honor the memory of 
those who drew the great prize of death in bat- 
tle, a word in reference to the survivors: I 
think that one lesson everyone who >vas capable 
of learning anything learned from his expe- 
rience in that war was the old, old lesson that 
we need to apply in peace quite as much — the 
lesson that the man who does not care to do any 
act until the time for heroic action comes, does 
not do the heroic act when the time does come. 
You all of you remember, comrades, some man 
— it is barely possible some of you remember be- 
ing the man — who, when you enlisted, had a 
theory that there was nothing but splendor and 
fighting and bloodshed in the war, and then had 
the experience of learning that the first thing you 
had to do was to perform commonplace duties, 
and perform them well. The work of any man 
in the campaign depended upon the resolution 
and effective intelligence with which he started 
about doing each duty as it arose; not waiting 

until he could choose the duty that he thought 

69 



yo The Hero 

sufficiently spectacular to do, but doing the duty 
that came to hand. That is exactly the lesson 
that all of us need to learn in times of peace. 
It is not merely a great thing, but an indispensa- 
ble thing that the nation's citizens should be 
ready and willing to die for it in time of need; 
and the presence of no other quality could atone 
for the lack of such readiness to lay down life 
if the nation calls. But in addition to dying for 
the nation you must be willing and anxious to 
live for the nation, or the nation will be badly 
off. If you want to do your duty only when the 
time comes for you to die, the nation will be de- 
prived of valuable services during your lives. 

I never see a gathering of this kind; I never 
see a gathering under the auspices of any of the 
societies which are organized to commemorate 
the valor and patriotism of the founders of this 
nation ; I never see a gathering composed of the 
men who fought in the great Civil War or in 
any of the lesser contests in which this country 
has been engaged, without feeling the anxiety to 
make such a gathering feel, each in his or her 
heart, the all-importance of doing the ordinary, 
humdrum, commonplace duties of each day as 
those duties arise. A large part of the success 
on the day of battle is always due to the aggre- 
gate of the individual performance of duty dur- 



The True Basis of Heroism yi 

ing the long months that have preceded the day 
of battle. The way in which a nation arises to 
a great crisis is largely conditioned upon the way 
in which its citizens have habituated themselves 
to act in the ordinary affairs of the national life. 
You cannot expect that much will be done in the 
supreme hour of peril by soldiers who have not 
fitted themselves to meet the need when the need 
comes, and you cannot expect the highest type 
of citizenship in the periods when it is needed 
if that citizenship has not been trained by the 
faithful performance of ordinary duty. What 
we need most in this Republic is not special gen- 
ius, not unusual brilliancy, but the honest and 
upright adherence on the part of the mass of 
the citizens and of their representatives to the 
fundamental laws of private and public morality 
— which are now what they have been during 
recorded history. We shall succeed or fail in 
making this Republic what it should be made 
— I will go a little further than that — what it 
shall and must be made, accordingly as we do 
or do not seriously and resolutely set ourselves 
to do the tasks of citizenship — and good citizen- 
ship consists in doing the many small duties, pri- 
vate and public, which in the aggregate make it 
up. — Speech at Arlington, May 21, 1902. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

[An Address Delivered at LincoMs Birthplace on 
February 12 > igog.~\ 

We have met here to celebrate the hundredth 
anniversary of the birth of one of the two great- 
est Americans; of one of the two or three great- 
est men of the nineteenth century; of one of the 
greatest men in the world's history. This rail- 
splitter, this boy who passed his ungainly youth 
in the dire poverty of the poorest of the frontier 
folk, whose rise was by weary and painful labor, 
lived to lead his people through the burning 
flames of a struggle from which the nation 
emerged, purified as by fire, born anew to a 
loftier life. After long years of iron effort, and 
of failure that came more often than victory, he 
at last rose to the leadership of the Republic, 
at the moment when that leadership had be- 
come the stupendous world-task of the time. 
He grew to know greatness, but never ease. 
Success came to him, but never happiness, save 

72 



Abraham Lincoln 73 

that which springs from doing well a painful and 
a vital task. Power was his, but not pleasure. 
The furrows deepened on his brow, but his eyes 
were undimmed by either hate or fear. His 
gaunt shoulders were bowed, but his steel thews 
never faltered as he bore for a burden the des- 
tinies of his people. His great and tender heart 
shrank from giving pain; and the task allotted 
him was to pour out like water the life-blood of 
the young men, and to feel in his every fibre 
the sorrow of the women. Disaster saddened 
but never dismayed him. As the red years of 
war went by they found him ever doing his 
duty in the present, ever facing the future 
with fearless front, high of heart, and daunt- 
less of soul. Unbroken by hatred, unshaken by 
scorn, he worked and suffered for the people. 
Triumph was his at the last; and barely had 
he tasted it before murder found him, and 
the kindly, patient, fearless eyes were closed 
forever. 

As a people we are indeed beyond measure 
fortunate in the characters of the two greatest 
of our public men, Washington and Lincoln. 
Widely though they differed in externals, the 
Virginia landed gentleman and the Kentucky 
backwoodsman, they were alike in essentials, 
they were alike in the great qualities which 



74 The Hero 

made each able to do service to his nation and 
to all mankind such as no other man of his 
generation could or did render. Each had lofty 
ideals, but each in striving to attain these lofty 
ideals was guided by the soundest common sense. 
Each possessed inflexible courage in adversity, 
and a soul wholly unspoiled by prosperity. 
Each possessed all the gentler virtues commonly 
exhibited by good men who lack rugged strength 
of character. Each possessed also all the strong 
qualities commonly exhibited by those towering 
masters of mankind who have too often shown 
themselves devoid of so much as the under- 
standing of the words by which we signify the 
qualities of duty, of mercy, of devotion to the 
right, of lofty disinterestedness in battling for 
the good of others. There have been other 
men as great and other men as good; but 
in all the history of mankind there are no other 
two great men as good as these, no other two 
good men as great. Widely though the prob- 
lems of to-day differ from the problems set 
for solution to Washington when he founded 
this nation, to Lincoln when he saved it and 
freed the slave, yet the qualities they showed 
in meeting these problems are exactly the same 
as those we should show in doing our work 
to-day. 



Abraham Lincoln 



75 



Lincoln saw into the future with the prophetic 
imagination usually vouchsafed only to the poet 
and the seer. He had in him all the lift toward 
greatness of the visionary, without any of the 
visionary's fanaticism or egotism, without any 
of the visionary's narrow jealousy of the prac- 
tical man and inability to strive in practical 
fashion for the realization of an ideal. He had 
the practical man's hard common sense and 
willingness to adapt means to ends; but there 
was in him none of that morbid growth of mind 
and soul which blinds so many practical men to 
the higher aims of life./ No more practical man 
ever lived than this homely backwoods idealist; 
but he had nothing in common with those prac- 
tical men whose consciences are warped until 
they fail to distinguish between good and evil, 
fail to understand that strength, ability, shrewd- 
ness, whether in the world of business or of 
politics, only serve to make their possessor a 
more noxious, a more evil, member of the com- 
munity if they are not guided and controlled by 
a fine and high moral sense. 

We of this day must try to solve many social 
and industrial problems, requiring to an es- 
pecial degree the combination of indomitable 
resolution with cool-headed sanity. We can 
profit by the way in which Lincoln used both 



y6 The Hero 

these traits as he strove for reform. We can 
learn much of value from the very attacks which 
following that course brought upon his head, 
attacks alike by the extremists of revolution and 
by the extremists of reaction. He never wa- 
vered in devotion to his principles, in his love for 
the Union, and in his abhorrence of slavery. 
Timid and lukewarm people were always de- 
nouncing him because he was too extreme; but 
as a matter of fact he never went to extremes, 
he worked step by step; and because of this the 
extremists hated and denounced him with a 
fervor which now seems to us fantastic in its 
deification of the unreal and the impossible. 
At the very time when one side was holding him 
up as the apostle of social revolution because he 
was against slavery, the leading abolitionist de- 
nounced him as the "slave hound of Illinois.' 5 
When he was the second time candidate for 
President, the majority of his opponents at- 
tacked him because of what they termed his ex- 
treme radicalism, while a minority threatened 
to bolt his nomination because he was not rad- 
ical enough. He had continually to check those 
who wished to go forward too fast, at the very 
time that he overrode the opposition of those 
who wished not to go forward at all. The goal 
was never dim before his vision; but he picked 



Abraham Lincoln 77 

his way cautiously, without either halt or 
hurry, as he strode toward it, through such a 
morass of difficulty that no man of less courage 
would have attempted it, while it would surely 
have overwhelmed any man of judgment less 
serene. 

Yet perhaps the most wonderful thing of all, 
and, from the standpoint of the America of to- 
day and of the future, the most vitally import- 
ant, was the extraordinary way in which Lin- 
coln could fight valiantly against what he 
deemed wrong and yet preserve undiminished 
his love and respect for the brother from whom 
he differed. In the hour of a triumph that 
would have turned any weaker man's head, in 
the heat of a struggle which spurred many a 
good man to dreadful vindictiveness, he said 
truthfully that so long as he had been in his 
office he had never willingly planted a thorn in 
any man's bosom, and besought his supporters 
to study the incidents of the trial through which 
they were passing as philosophy from which to 
learn wisdom and not as wrongs to be avenged; 
ending with the solemn exhortation that, as the 
strife was over, all should reunite in a common 
effort to save their common country. 

He lived in days that were great and terrible, 
when brother fought against brother for what 



78 The Hero 

each sincerely deemed to be the right. In a con- 
test so grim the strong men who alone can carry 
it through are rarely able to do justice to the 
deep convictions of those with whom they grap- 
ple in mortal strife. At such times men see 
through a glass darkly; to only the rarest and 
loftiest spirits is vouchsafed that clear vision 
which gradually comes to all, even to the lesser, 
as the struggle fades into distance, and wounds 
are forgotten, and peace creeps back to the 
hearts that were hurt. But to Lincoln was given 
this supreme vision. He did not hate the man 
from whom he differed. Weakness was as 
foreign as wickedness to his strong, gentle na- 
ture; but his courage was of a quality so high 
that it needed no bolstering of dark passion. 
He saw clearly that the same high qualities, the 
same courage, and willingness for self-sacrifice, 
and devotion to the right as it was given them 
to see the right, belonged both to the men of 
the North and to the men of the South. As 
the years roll by, and as all of us, wherever we 
dwell, grow to feel an equal pride in the valor 
and self-devotion, alike of the men who wore 
the blue and the men who wore the gray, so this 
whole nation will grow to feel a peculiar sense 
of pride in the man whose blood was shed 
for the union of his people and for the free- 



Abraham Lincoln 



79 



dom of a race; the lover of his country and 
of all mankind; the mightiest of the mighty 
men who mastered the mighty days, Abraham 
Lincoln. 



GRANT 

In the long run every great nation instinct- 
ively recognizes the men who peculiarly and pre- 
eminently represent its own type of greatness. 
Here in our country we have had many public 
men of high rank — soldiers, orators, construc- 
tive statesmen, and popular leaders. We have 
even had great philosophers who were also lead- 
ers of popular thought. Each one of these men 
has had his own group of devoted followers, 
and some of them have at times swayed the na- 
tion with a power such as the foremost of all 
hardly wielded. Yet as the generations slip 
away, as the dust of conflict settles, and as 
through the clearing air we look back with keen- 
er wisdom into the nation's past, mightiest 
among the mighty dead loom the three great 
figures of Washington, Lincoln, and Grant. 
There are great men also in the second rank; 
for in any gallery of merely national heroes 
Franklin and Hamilton, Jefferson and Jackson, 
would surely have their place. But these three 
greatest men have taken their place among the 

80 



\j-if~t 




GENERAL U. S. GRANT. 
At headquarters in the Wilderness, .May, 1864— aged 42- 



Grant 81 

great men of all nations, the great men of all 
time. They stood supreme in the two great 
crises of our history, on the two great occasions 
when we stood in the van of all humanity and 
struck the most effective blows that have ever 
been struck for the cause of human freedom un- 
der the law, for that spirit of orderly liberty 
which must stand at the base of every wise 
movement to secure to each man his rights, and 
to guard each from being wronged by his fel- 
lows. 

Washington fought in the earlier struggle, 
and it was his good fortune to win the highest 
renown alike as soldier and statesman. In the 
second and even greater struggle the deeds of 
Lincoln the statesman were made good by those 
of Grant the soldier, and later Grant himself 
took up the work that dropped from Lincoln's 
tired hands when the assassin's bullet went 
home, and the sad, patient, kindly eyes were 
closed forever. 

It was no mere accident that made our three 
mightiest men, two of them soldiers, and one the 
great war President. It is only through work 
and strife that either nation or individual moves 
on to greatness. The great man is always the 
man of mighty effort, and usually the man 
whom grinding need has trained to mighty ef- 



82 The Hero 

fort. Rest and peace are good things, are great 
blessings, but only if they come honorably; and 
it is those who fearlessly turn away from them, 
when they have not been earned, who in the long 
run deserve best of their country. In the sweat 
of our brows do we eat bread, and though the 
sweat is bitter at times, yet it is far more bitter 
to eat the bread that is unearned, unwon, unde- 
served. America must nerve herself for labor 
and peril. The men who have made our na- 
tional greatness are those who faced danger and 
overcame it, who met difficulties and surmount- 
ed them, not those whose lines were cast in such 
pleasant places that toil and dread were ever far 
from. them. 

Neither was it an accident that our three lead- 
ers were men who, while they did not shrink 
from war, were nevertheless heartily men of 
peace. The man who will not fight to avert or 
undo wrong is but a poor creature; but, after all, 
he is less dangerous than the man who fights on 
the side of wrong. Again and again in a na- 
tion's history the time may, and indeed some- 
times must, come when the nation's highest duty 
is war. But peace must be the normal condi- 
tion, or the nation will come to a bloody doom. 
Twice in great crises, in 1776 and 1861, and 
twice in lesser crises, in 18 12 and 1898, the na- 



Grant 83 

tion was called to arms in the name of all that 
makes the words "honor," "freedom," and 
"justice" other than empty sounds. On each 
occasion the net result of the war was greatly 
for the benefit of mankind. But on each occa- 
sion this net result was of benefit only because 
after the war came peace, came justice and or- 
der and liberty. If the Revolution had been fol- 
lowed by bloody anarchy, if the Declaration of 
Independence had not been supplemented by the 
adoption of the Constitution, if the freedom 
won by the sword of Washington had not been 
supplemented by the stable and orderly govern- 
ment which Washington was instrumental in 
founding, then we should have but added to the 
chaos of the world, and our victories would have 
told against and not for the betterment of man- 
kind. So it was with the Civil War. If the 
four iron years had not been followed by peace, 
they would not have been justified. If the great 
silent soldier, the Hammer of the North, had 
struck the shackles off the slave only, as so many 
conquerors in civil strife before him had done, 
to rivet them around the wrists of freemen, then 
the war would have been fought in vain, and 
worse than in vain. If the Union, which so 
many men shed their blood to restore, were not 
now a union in fact, then the precious blood 



84 The Hero 

would have been wasted. But it was not wasted ; 
for the work of peace has made good the work 
of war, and North and South, East and West, 
we are now one people in fact as well as in name ; 
one in purpose, in fellow-feeling, and in high 
resolve, as we stand to greet the new century, 
and, high of heart, to face the mighty tasks 
which the coming years will surely bring. 

Grant and his fellow-soldiers who fought 
through the war, and his fellow-statesmen who 
completed the work partly done by the soldiers, 
not only left us the heritage of a reunited coun- 
try and of a land from which slavery had been 
banished, but left us what was quite as impor- 
tant, the great memory of their great deeds, to 
serve forever as an example and an inspiration, 
to spur us on so that we may not fall below the 
level reached by our fathers. The rough, 
strong poet of democracy has sung of Grant as 
u the man of mighty days, and equal to the 
days." The days are less mighty now, and that 
is all the more reason why we should show our- 
selves equal to them. We meet here to pay glad 
homage to the memory of our illustrious dead; 
but let us keep ever clear before our minds the 
fact that mere lip-loyalty is no loyalty at all, 
and that the only homage that counts is the 
homage of deeds, not of words. It is but an idle 



Grant 85 

waste of time to celebrate the memory of the 
dead unless we, the living, in our lives strive to 
show ourselves not unworthy of them. If the 
careers of Washington and Grant are not vital 
and full of meaning to us, if they are merely 
part of the storied past, and stir us to no eager 
emulation in the ceaseless, endless war for right 
against wrong, then the root of right thinking 
is not in us ; and where we do not think right we 
cannot act right. 

I shall ask attention, not to Grant's life, but 
to the lessons taught by that life as we of to-day 
should learn them. 

Foremost of all is the lesson of tenacity, of 
stubborn fixity of purpose. In the Union armies 
there were generals as brilliant as Grant, but 
none with his iron determination. This quality 
he showed as President no less than as general. 
He was no more to be influenced by a hostile 
majority in Congress into abandoning his atti- 
tude in favor of a sound and stable currency 
than he was to be influenced by check or repulse 
into releasing his grip on beleaguered Rich- 
mond. It is this element of unshakable strength 
to which we are apt specially to refer when we 
praise a man in the simplest and most effective 
way, by praising him as a man. It is the one 
quality which we can least afford to lose. It is 



86 The Hero 

the only quality the lack of which is as unpar- 
donable in the nation as in the man. It is the 
antithesis of levity, fickleness, volatility, of un- 
due exaltation, of undue depression, of hysteria 
and neuroticism in all their myriad forms. The 
lesson of unyielding, unflinching, unfaltering 
perseverance in the course upon which the na- 
tion has entered is one very necessary for a gen- 
eration whose preachers sometimes dwell over- 
much on the policies of the moment. There are 
not a few public men, not a few men who try to 
mould opinion within Congress and without, on 
the stump and in the daily press, who seem to 
aim at instability, who pander to and thereby 
increase the thirst for overstatement of each sit- 
uation as it arises, whose effort is, accordingly, 
to make the people move in zigzags instead of 
in a straight line. We all saw this in the Span- 
ish War, when the very men who at one time 
branded as traitors everybody who said there 
was anything wrong in the army at another 
time branded as traitors everybody who said 
there was anything right. Of course such an 
attitude is as unhealthy on one side as on the 
other, and it is equally destructive of any effort 
to do away with abuse. 

Eighteen months after the Civil War began 
the State and congressional elections went heav- 



Grant 87 

ily against the war party, and two years later the 
opposition party actually waged the Presidential 
campaign on the issue that the war was a failure. 
Meanwhile there was plenty of blundering at 
the front, plenty of mistakes at Washington. 
The country was saved by the fact that our peo- 
ple, as a whole, were steadfast and unshaken. 
Both at Washington and at the front the lead- 
ers were men of undaunted resolution, who 
would not abandon the policy to which the na- 
tion was definitely committed, who regarded 
disaster as merely a spur to fresh effort, who 
saw in each blunder merely something to be re- 
trieved, and not a reason for abandoning the 
long-determined course. Above all, the great 
mass of the people possessed a tough and stub- 
born fibre of character. 

There was then, as always, ample room for 
criticism, and there was every reason why the 
mistakes should be corrected. But in the long 
run our gratitude was due primarily, not to the 
critics, not to the fault-finders, but to the men 
who actually did the work; not to the men of 
negative policy, but to those who struggled to- 
ward the given goal. Merciful oblivion has 
swallowed up the names of those who railed at 
the men who were saving the Union, while it 
has given us the memory of these same men as a 



88 The Hero 

heritage of honor forever; and brightest among 
their names flame those of Lincoln and Grant, 
the steadfast, the unswerving, the enduring, the 
finally triumphant. 

Grant's supreme virtue as a soldier was his 
doggedness, the quality which found expression 
in his famous phrases of "unconditional surren- 
der" and "fighting it out on this line if it takes 
all summer." He was a master of strategy and 
tactics, but he was also a master of hard hitting, 
of that "continuous hammering" which finally 
broke through even Lee's guard. While an 
armed foe was in the field, it never occurred to 
Grant that any question could be so important 
as his overthrow. He felt nothing but impatient 
contempt for the weak souls who wished to hold 
parley with the enemy while that enemy was 
still capable of resistance. 

Grant was no brawler, no lover of fighting 
for fighting's sake. He was a plain, quiet man, 
not seeking for glory; but a man who, when 
aroused, was always in deadly earnest, and who 
never shrank from duty. He was slow to strike, 
but he never struck softly. He was not in the 
least of the type which gets up mass-meetings, 
makes inflammatory speeches or passes inflam- 
matory resolutions, and then permits overforci- 
ble talk to be followed by overfeeble action. 



Grant go 

His promise squared with his performance. 
His deeds made good his words. He did not 
denounce an evil in strained and hyperbolic lan- 
guage; but when he did denounce it, he strove 
to make his denunciation effective by his action. 
He did not plunge lightly into war, but once in, 
he saw the war through, and when it was over, 
it was over entirely. Unsparing in battle, he 
was very merciful in victory. There was no let- 
up in his grim attack, his grim pursuit, until the 
last body of armed foes surrendered. But that 
feat once accomplished, his first thought was for 
the valiant defeated; to let them take back their 
horses to their little homes because they would 
need them to work on their farms. Grant, the 
champion whose sword was sharpest in the great 
fight for liberty, was no less sternly insistent 
upon the need of order and of obedience to law. 
No stouter foe of anarchy in every form ever 
lived within our borders. The man who more 
than any other, save Lincoln, had changed us 
into a nation whose citizens were all freemen, 
realized entirely that these freemen would re- 
main free only while they kept mastery over 
their own evil passions. He saw that lawlessness 
in all its forms was the handmaiden of tyranny. 
No nation ever yet retained its freedom for any 
length of time after losing its respect for the 



90 The Hero 

law, after losing the law-abiding spirit, the spir- 
it that really makes orderly liberty. 

Grant, in short, stood for the great element- 
ary virtues, for justice, for freedom, for order, 
for unyielding resolution, for manliness in its 
broadest and highest sense. His greatness was 
not so much greatness of intellect as greatness 
of character, including in the word "character" 
all the strong, virile virtues. It is character 
that counts in a nation as in a man. It is a good 
thing to have a keen, fine intellectual develop- 
ment in a nation, to produce orators, artists, suc- 
cessful business men ; but it is an infinitely great- 
er thing to have those solid qualities which we 
group together under the name of character — 
sobriety, steadfastness, the sense of obligation 
toward one's neighbor and one's God, hard 
common sense, and, combined with it, the lift 
of generous enthusiasm toward whatever is 
right. These are the qualities which go to make 
up true national greatness, and these were the 
qualities which Grant possessed in an eminent 
degree. 

We have come here, then, to realize what the 
mighty dead did for the nation, what the dead 
did for us who are now living. Let us in return 
try to shape our deeds so that the America of 
the future shall justify by her career the lives 



Grant 



91 



of the great men of her past. Every man who 
does his duty as a soldier, as a statesman, or as 
a private citizen is paying to Grant's memory 
the kind of homage that is best worth paying. 
We have difficulties and dangers enough in the 
present, and it is the way we face them which 
is to determine whether or not we are fit de- 
scendants of the men of the mighty past. We 
must not flinch from our duties abroad merely 
because we have even more important duties at 
home. That these home duties are the most im- 
portant of all every thinking man will freely 
acknowledge. We must do our duty to ourselves 
and our brethren in the complex social life of 
the time. We must possess the spirit of broad 
humanity, deep charity, and loving-kindness for 
our fellow-men, and must remember, at the 
same time, that this spirit is really the absolute 
antithesis of mere sentimentalism, of soup- 
kitchen, pauperizing philanthropy, and of leg- 
islation which is inspired either by foolish mock 
benevolence or by class greed or class hate. We 
need to be possessed of the spirit of justice and 
of the spirit which recognizes in work and not 
ease the proper end of effort. 

Of course the all-important thing to keep in 
mind is that if we have not both strength and 
virtue we shall fail. Indeed, in the old accepta- 



^ 2 The Hero 

tion of the word, virtue included strength and 
courage, for the clear-sighted men at the dawn 
of our era knew that the passive virtues 
could not by themselves avail, that wisdom with- 
out courage would sink into mere cunning, and 
courage without morality into ruthless, lawless, 
self-destructive ferocity. The iron Roman 
made himself lord of the world because to the 
courage of the barbarian he opposed a courage 
as fierce and an infinitely keener mind; while 
his civilized rivals, the keen-witted Greek and 
Carthaginian, though of even finer intellect, had 
let corruption eat into their brilliant civiliza- 
tions until their strength had been corroded as 
if by acid. In short, the Roman had character 
as well as masterful genius, and when pitted 
against peoples either of less genius or of less 
character, these peoples went down. 

As the ages roll by, the eternal problem for- 
ever fronting each man and each race forever 
shifts its outward shape, and yet at the bottom 
it is always the same. There are dangers of 
peace and dangers of war; dangers of excess in 
militarism and of excess by the avoidance of 
duty that implies militarism; dangers of slow 
dry-rot, and dangers which become acute only 
in great crises. When these crises come, the 
nation will triumph or sink accordingly as it 



Grant 



93 



produces or fails to produce statesmen like Lin- 
coln and soldiers like Grant, and accordingly as 
it does or does not back them in their efforts. 
We do not need men of unsteady brilliancy or 
erratic power — unbalanced men. The men we 
need are the men of strong, earnest, solid char- 
acter — the men who possess the homely virtues, 
and who to these virtues add rugged courage, 
rugged honesty, and high resolve. Grant, with 
his self-poise, his self-command, his self-mas- 
tery; Grant, who loved peace and did not fear 
war, who would not draw the sword if he could 
honorably keep it sheathed, but who, when once 
he had drawn it, would not return it to the 
sheath until the weary years had brought the 
blood-won victory; Grant, who had no thought 
after the fight was won save of leading the life 
led by other Americans, and who aspired to the 
Presidency only as Zachary Taylor or Andrew 
Jackson had aspired to it — Grant was of a type 
upon which the men of to-day can well afford to 
model themselves. 



SOME ROUGH RIDER HEROES 

[Las Gtiasimas, June 24, i8g8.] 

No man was allowed to drop out to help the 
wounded. It was hard to leave them there in 
the jungle, where they might not be found again 
until the vultures and the land-crabs came, but 
war is a grim game and there was no choice. 
One of the men shot was Harry Heffner, of G 
Troop, who was mortally wounded through the 
hips. He fell without uttering a sound, and two 
of his companions dragged him behind a tree. 
Here he propped himself up and asked to be 
given his canteen and his rifle, which I handed to 
him. He then again began shooting, and contin- 
ued loading and firing until the line moved for- 
ward and we left him alone, dying in the gloomy 
shade. When we found him again, after the 
fight, he was dead. 

At one time, as I was out of touch with that 
part of my wing commanded by Jenkins and 
O'Neill, I sent Greenway, with Sergeant Rus- 
sell, a New Yorker, and Trooper Rowland, a 
New Mexican cow-puncher, down in the valley 
to find out where they were. To do this the 

94 



Some Rough Rider Heroes 95 

three had to expose themselves to a very severe 
fire, but they were not men to whom this mat- 
tered. Russell was killed; the other two re- 
turned and reported to me the position of Jen- 
kins and O'Neill. They then resumed their 
places on the firing-line. After a while I no- 
ticed blood coming out of Rowland's side and 
discovered that he had been shot, although he 
did not seem to be taking any notice of it. He 
said the wound was only slight, but as I saw he 
had broken a rib, I told him to go to the rear to 
the hospital. After some grumbling he went, 
but fifteen minutes later he was back on the fir- 
ing-line again and said he could not find the 
hospital — which I doubted. However, I then 
let him stay until the end of the fight. 

After we had driven the Spaniards off from 
their position to our right, the firing seemed to 
die away so far as we were concerned, for the 
bullets no longer struck around us in such a 
storm as before, though along the rest of the 
line the battle was as brisk as ever. Soon we 
saw troops appearing across the ravine, not very 
far from where we had seen the Spaniards 
whom we had thought might be Cubans. Again 
we dared not fire, and carefully studied the new- 
comers with our glasses; and this time we were 
right, for we recognized our own cavalry-men. 



96 The Hero 

We were by no means sure that they recognized 
us, however, and were anxious that they should, 
but it was very difficult to find a clear spot 
in the jungle from which to signal; so Ser- 
geant Lee, of Troop K, climbed a tree and from 
its summit waved the troop guidon. They waved 
their guidon back, and as our right wing was 
now in touch with the regulars, I left Jen- 
kins and O'Neill to keep the connection, and led 
Llewellen's troop back to the path to join the 
rest of the regiment, which was evidently still 
in the thick of :he fight. I was still very much 
in the dark as to where the main body of the 
Spanish forces were, or exactly what lines the 
battle was following, and was very uncertain 
what I ought to do ; but I knew it could not be 
wrong to go forward, and I thought I would 
find Wood and then see what he wished me to 
do. I was in a mood to cordially welcome guid- 
ance, for it was most bewildering to fight an 
enemy whom one so rarely saw. 

I had not seen Wood since the beginning of 
the skirmish, when he hurried forward. When 
the firing opened some of the men began to 
curse. "Don't swear — shoot!" growled Wood, 
as he strode along the path leading his horse, 
and everyone laughed and became cool again. 
The Spanish outposts were very near our ad- 



Some Rough Rider Heroes ny 

vance guard, and some minutes of the hottest 
kind of firing followed before they were driven 
back and slipped off through the jungle to their 
main lines in the rear. 

Here, at the very outset of our active service, 
we suffered the loss of two as gallant men as 
ever wore uniform. Sergeant Hamilton Fish 
at the extreme front, while holding the point 
up to its work and firing back where the Spanish 
advance guards lay, was shot and instantly 
killed; three of the men with him were likewise 
hit. Captain Capron, leading the advance 
guard in person, and displaying equal courage 
and coolness in the way that he handled them, 
was also struck, and died a few minutes after- 
ward. The command of the troop then de- 
volved upon the First Lieutenant, young Thom- 
as. Like Capron, Thomas was the fifth in line 
from father to son who had served in the Amer- 
ican army, though in his case it was in the vol- 
unteer and not the regular service; the four 
preceding generations had furnished soldiers 
respectively to the Revolutionary War, the War 
of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Civil War. 
In a few minutes Thomas was shot through the 
leg, and the command devolved upon the Sec- 
ond Lieutenant, Day (a nephew of "Albe- 
marle" Cushing, he who sunk the great Confed- 



98 The Hero 

erate ram). Day, who proved himself to be 
one of our most efficient officers, continued to 
handle the men to the best possible advantage, 
and brought them steadily forward. L Troop 
was from the Indian Territory. The whites, 
Indians, and half-breeds in it, all fought with 
equal courage. Captain McClintock was hur- 
ried forward to its relief with his Troop B of 
Arizona men. In a few minutes he was shot 
through the leg and his place was taken by his 
first Lieutenant, Wilcox, who handled his men 
in the same soldierly manner that Day did. 

Among the men who showed marked cour- 
age and coolness was the tall color sergeant, 
Wright; the colors were shot through three 
times. 

When I had led G Troop back to the trail I 
ran ahead of them, passing the dead and wound- 
ed men of L Troop, passing young Fish as he 
lay with glazed eyes under the rank tropic 
growth to one side of the trail. When I came 
to the front I found the men spread out in a 
very thin skirmish line, advancing through com- 
paratively open ground, each man taking ad- 
vantage of what cover he could, while Wood 
strolled about leading his horse, Brodie being 
close at hand. How Wood escaped being hit, 
I do not see, and still less how his horse escaped. 



Some Rough Rider Heroes 99 

I had left mine at the beginning of the action, 
and was only regretting that I had not left my 
sword with it, as it kept getting between my legs 
when I was tearing my way through the jungle. 
I never wore it again in action. Lieutenant Riv- 
ers was with Wood, also leading his horse. 
Smedburg had been sent off on the by no means 
pleasant task of establishing communications 
with Young. 

Very soon after I reached the front, Brodie 
was hit, the bullet shattering one arm and 
whirling him around as he stood. He had kept 
on the extreme front all through, his presence 
and example keeping his men entirely steady, 
and he at first refused to go to the rear; but the 
wound was very painful, and he became so faint 
that he had to be sent. Thereupon, Wood di- 
rected me to take charge of the left wing in Bro- 
die's place, and to bring it forward; so over I 
went. 

One of the men who fired first, and who dis- 
played conspicuous gallantry, was a Cherokee 
half-breed, who was hit seven times, and of 
course had to go back to the States. Before he 
rejoined us at Montauk Point he had gone 
through a little private war of his own ; for on 
his return he found that a cowboy had gone off 
with his sweetheart, and in the fight that ensued 



loo The Hero 

he shot his rival. Another man of L Troop who 
also showed marked gallantry was Elliot Cow- 
din. The men of the plains and mountains were 
trained by lifelong habit to look on life and 
death with iron philosophy. As I passed by a 
couple of tall, lank, Oklahoma cow-punchers, I 
heard one say, "Well, some of the boys got it in 
the neck !" to which the other answered with the 
grim plains proverb of the South: "Many a 
good horse dies." 

Thomas Isbell, a half-breed Cherokee in the 
squad under Hamilton Fish, was among the 
first to shoot and be shot at. He was wounded 
no less than seven times. The first wound was 
received by him two minutes after he had fired 
his first shot, the bullet going through his neck. 
The second hit him in the left thumb. The 
third struck near his right hip, passing entirely 
through the body. The fourth bullet (which 
was apparently from a Remington and not from 
a Mauser) went into his neck and lodged 
against the bone, being afterward cut out. The 
fifth bullet again hit his left hand. The sixth 
scraped his head, and the seventh his neck. He 
did not receive all of the wounds at the same 
time, over half an hour elapsing between the first 
and the last. Up to receiving the last wound he 
had declined to leave the firing-line, but by that 



Some Rough Rider Heroes loi 

time he had lost so much blood that he had to be 
sent to the rear. The man's wiry toughness 
was as notable as his courage. 

We improvised litters, and carried the more 
sorely wounded back to Siboney that afternoon 
and the next morning; the others walked. One 
of the men who had been most severely wound- 
ed was Edward Marshall, the correspondent, 
and he showed as much heroism as any soldier 
in the whole army. He was shot through the 
spine, a terrible and very painful wound, which 
we supposed meant that he would surely die; 
but he made no complaint of any kind, and while 
he retained consciousness persisted in dictating 
the story of the fight. A very touching incident 
happened in the improvised open-air hospital 
after the fight, where the wounded were lying. 
They did not groan, and made no complaint, 
trying to help one another. One of them sud- 
denly began to hum, "My Country 'tis of 
Thee," and one by one the others joined in the 
chorus, which swelled out through the tropic 
woods, where the victors lay in camp beside 
their dead. I did not see any sign among the 
fighting men, whether wounded or unwounded, 
of the very complicated emotions assigned to 
their kind by some of the realistic modern nov- 
elists who have written about battles. At the 



102 The Hero 

front every one behaved quite simply and took 
things as they came, in a matter-of-course way; 
but there was doubtless, as is always the case, a 
good deal of panic and confusion in the rear, 
where the wounded, the stragglers, a few of the 
packers, and two or three newspaper corre- 
spondents were, and in consequence the first re- 
ports sent back to the coast were of a most 
alarming character, describing with minute in- 
accuracy, how we had run into an ambush, etc. 
The packers with the mules which carried the 
rapid-fire guns were among those who ran, and 
they let the mules go in the jungle; in conse- 
quence the guns were never even brought to the 
firing-line, and only Fred Herrig's skill as a 
trailer enabled us to recover them. By patient 
work he followed up the mules' tracks in the 
forest until he found the animals. 

Among the wounded who walked to the tem- 
porary hospital at Siboney was the trooper, 
Rowland, of whom I spoke before. There the 
doctors examined him, and decreed that his 
wound was so serious that he must go back to 
the States. This was enough for Rowland, 
who waited until nightfall and then escaped, 
slipping out of the window and making his way 
back to camp with his rifle and pack, though his 
wound must have made all movement very pain- 




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Some Rough Rider Heroes 103 

ful to him. After this we felt that he was enti- 
tled to stay, and he never left us for a day, dis- 
tinguishing himself again in the fight at San 
Juan. 

Next morning we buried seven dead Rough 
Riders in a grave on the summit of the trail, 
Chaplain Brown reading the solemn burial serv- 
ice of the Episcopalians, while the men stood 
around with bared heads and joined in singing, 
"Rock of Ages." Vast numbers of vultures 
were wheeling round and round in great circles 
through the blue sky overhead. There could be 
no more honorable burial than that of these men 
in a common grave — Indian and cowboy, miner, 
packer, and college athlete — the man of un- 
known ancestry from the lonely Western plains, 
and the man who carried on his watch the crest 
of the Stuyvesants and the Fishes, one in the 
way they had met death, just as during life they 
had been one in their daring and their loyalty. 

One of the men I took with me on one of 
these trips was Sherman Bell, the former Dep- 
uty Marshal of Cripple Creek, and Wells-Far- 
go Express rider. In coming home with his 
load, through a blinding storm, he slipped and 
opened the old rupture. The agony was very 
great and one of his comrades took his load. 
He himself, sometimes walking, and sometimes 



104 The Hero 

crawling, got back to camp, where Dr. Church 
fixed him up with a spike bandage, but in- 
formed him that he would have to be sent back 
to the States when an ambulance came along. 
The ambulance did not come until the next day, 
which was the day before we marched to San 
Juan. It arrived after nightfall, and as soon as 
Bell heard it coming, he crawled out of the hos- 
pital tent into the jungle, where he lay all night; 
and the ambulance went off without him. The 
men shielded him just as school-boys would 
shield a companion, carrying his gun, belt, and 
bedding; while Bell kept out of sight until the 
column started, and then staggered along be- 
hind it. I found him the morning of the San 
Juan fight. He told me that he wanted to die 
fighting, if die he must, and I hadn't the heart 
to send him back. He did splendid service that 
day, and afterward in the trenches, and though 
the rupture opened twice again, and on each oc- 
casion he was within a hair's breadth of death, 
he escaped, and came back with us to the United 
States. 

The army was camped along the valley, 
ahead of and behind us, our outposts being es- 
tablished on either side. From the generals to 
the privates all were eager to march against San- 
tiago. At daybreak, when the tall palms began 



Some Rough Rider Heroes 105 

to show dimly through the rising mist, the 
scream of the cavalry trumpets tore the tropic 
dawn; and in the evening, as the bands of regi- 
ment after regiment played the "Star-Spangled 
Banner," all, officers and men alike, stood with 
heads uncovered, wherever they were, until the 
last strains of the anthem died away in the hot 
sunset air. 



THE BATTLE OF SAN JUAN 

HILL 



THE BATTLE OF SAN JUAN HILL 

[July i, 1S98.] 

I sent messenger after messenger to try to 
find General Sumner or General Wood and get 
permission to advance, and was just about mak- 
ing up my mind that in the absence of orders I 
had better "march toward the guns," when 
Lieutenant-Colonel Dorst came riding up 
through the storm of bullets with the welcome 
command "to move forward and support the 
regulars in the assault on the hills in front." 
General Sumner had obtained authority to ad- 
vance from Lieutenant Miley, who was repre- 
senting General Shafter at the front, and was in 
the thick of the fire. The General at once or- 
dered the first brigade to advance on the hills, 
and the second to support it. He himself was 
riding his horse along the lines, superintending 
the fight. Later I overheard a couple of my 
men talking together about him. What they 
said illustrates the value of a display of courage 
among the officers in hardening their soldiers; 
for their theme was how, as they were lying 

down under a fire which they could not return, 

109 



no The Battle of San Juan Hill 

and were in consequence feeling rather nervous, 
General Sumner suddenly appeared on horse- 
back, sauntering by quite unmoved; and, said 
one of the men, "That made us feel all right. 
If the General could stand it, we could." 

The instant I received the order I sprang on 
my horse and then my "crowded hour" began. 
The guerillas had been shooting at us from the 
edges of the jungle and from their perches in 
the leafy trees, and as they used smokeless pow- 
der, it was almost impossible to see them, 
though a few of my men had from time to time 
responded. We had also suffered from the hill 
on our right front, which was held chiefly by 
guerillas, although there were also some Spanish 
regulars with them, for we found their dead. I 
formed my men in column of troops, each troop 
extended in open skirmishing order, the right 
resting on the wire fences which bordered the 
sunken lane. Captain Jenkins led the first 
squadron, his eyes literally dancing with joyous 
excitement. 

I started in the rear of the regiment, the po- 
sition in which the colonel should theoretically 
stay. Captain Mills and Captain McCormick 
were both with me as aides; but I speedily had 
to send them off on special duty in getting the 
different bodies of men forward. I had intend- 




Major Major 
Dunn. Brodie. 



Major-Gen. 
Jos. Wheeler. 



Chaplain 
H. A. Brown. 



Colonel 

Leonard Wood. 



I i •■•] 

Theodore Roosevelt. 



GENERAL WHEELER AND GROUP OF ROUGH RIDER OFFICERS. 

Tampa, Fla., i8q8. 



The Battle of San Juan Hill 1 1 1, 

ed to go into action on foot as at Las Guasimas, 
but the heat was so oppressive that I found I 
should be quite unable to run up and down the 
line and superintend matters unless I was mount- 
ed; and, moreover, when on horseback, I could 
see the men better and they could see me better. 
A curious incident happened as I was getting 
the men started forward. Always when men 
have been lying down under cover for some 
time, and are required to advance, there is a lit- 
tle hesitation, each looking to see whether the 
others are going forward. As I rode down the 
line, calling to the troopers to go forward, and 
rasping brief directions to the captains and lieu- 
tenants, I came upon a man lying behind a little 
bush, and I ordered him to jump up. I do not 
think he understood that we were making a for- 
ward move, and he looked up at me for a mo- 
ment with hesitation, and I again bade him rise, 
jeering him and saying: "Are you afraid to 
stand up when I am on horseback?" As I 
spoke, he suddenly fell forward on his face, a 
bullet having struck him and gone through him 
lengthwise. I suppose the bullet had been 
aimed at me ; at any rate, I, who was on horse- 
back in the open, was unhurt, and the man lying 
flat on the ground in the cover beside me was 
killed. There were several pairs of brothers 



112 The Battle of San Jttan Hill 

with us; of the two Nortons one was killed; of 
the two McCurdys one was wounded. 

I soon found that I could get that line, be- 
hind which I personally was, faster forward 
than the one immediately in front of it, with the 
result that the two rearmost lines of the regi- 
ment began to crowd together; so I rode 
through them both, the better to move on the 
one in front. This happened with every line in 
succession, until I found myself at the head of 
the regiment. 

Both lieutenants of B Troop from Arizona 
had been exerting themselves greatly, and both 
were overcome by the heat; but Sergeants 
Campbell and Davidson took it forward in 
splendid shape. Some of the men from this 
troop and from the other Arizona troop 
(Bucky O'Neill's) joined me as a kind of fight- 
ing tail. 

The Ninth Regiment was immediately in 
front of me, and the First on my left, and these 
went up Kettle Hill with my regiment. The 
Third, Sixth, and Tenth went partly up Kettle 
Hill (following the Rough Riders and the 
Ninth and First), and partly between that and 
the block-house hill, which the infantry were as- 
sailing. General Sumner in person gave the 
Tenth the order to charge the hills ; and it went 



The Battle of San Jtca?i Hill 113 

forward at a rapid gait. The three regiments 
went forward more or less intermingled, ad- 
vancing steadily and keeping up a heavy fire. 
Up Kettle Hill Sergeant George Berry, of the 
Tenth, bore not only his own regimental colors 
but those of the Third, the color sergeant of the 
Third having been shot down ; he kept shouting 
"Dress on the colors, boys, dress on the colors!" 
as he followed Captain Ayres, who was running 
in advance of his men, shouting and waving his 
hat. The Tenth Cavalry lost a greater propor- 
tion of its officers than any other regiment in the 
battle — eleven out of twenty-two. 

By the time I had come to the head of the 
regiment we ran into the left wing of the Ninth 
Regulars, and some of the First Regulars, who 
were lyirig down; that is, the troopers were ly- 
ing down, while the officers were walking to 
and fro. The officers of the white and col- 
ored regiments alike took the greatest pride in 
seeing that the men more than did their duty; 
and the mortality among them was great. 

I spoke to the captain in command of the rear 
platoons, saying that I had been ordered to sup- 
port the regulars in the attack upon the hills, 
and that in my judgment we could not take these 
hills by firing at them, and that we must rush 
them. He answered that his orders were to 



114 The Battle of San Juan Hill 

keep his men lying where they were, and that 
he could not charge without orders. I asked 
where the Colonel was, and as he was not in 
sight, said, "Then I am the ranking officer here 
and I give the order to charge" — for I did not 
want to keep the men longer in the open suffer- 
ing under a fire which they could not effectively 
return. Naturally the Captain hesitated to 
obey this order when no word had been received 
from his own Colonel. So I said, "Then let my 
men through, sir," and rode on through the 
lines, followed by the grinning Rough Riders, 
whose attention had been completely taken off 
the Spanish bullets, partly by my dialogue with 
the regulars, and partly by the language I had 
been using to themselves as I got the lines for- 
ward, for I had been joking with some and 
swearing at others, as the exigencies of the case 
seemed to demand. When we started to go 
through, however, it proved too much for the 
regulars, and they jumped up and came along, 
their officers and troops mingling with mine, all 
being delighted at the chance. When I got to 
where the head of the left wing of the Ninth 
was lying, through the courtesy of Lieutenant 
Hartwick, two of whose colored troopers threw 
down the fence, I was enabled to get back into 
the lane, at the same time waving my hat, and 



The Battle of San Juan Hill 115 

giving the order to charge the hill on our right 
front. Out of my sight, over on the right, Cap- 
tains McBlain and Taylor, of the Ninth, made 
up their minds independently to charge at just 
about this time; and at almost the same moment 
Colonels Carroll and Hamilton, who were off, I 
believe, to my left, where we could see neither 
them nor their men, gave the order to advance. 
But of all this I knew nothing at the time. The 
whole line, tired of waiting, and eager to close 
with the enemy, was straining to go forward; 
and it seems that different parts slipped the leash 
at almost the same moment. The First Cavalry 
came up the hill just behind, and partly mixed 
with my regiment and the Ninth. As already 
said, portions of the Third, Sixth, and Tenth 
followed, while the rest of the members of these 
three regiments kept more in touch with the in- 
fantry on our left. 

By this time we were all in the spirit of the 
thing and greatly excited by the charge, the men 
cheering and running forward between shots, 
while the delighted faces of the foremost offi- 
cers, like Captain C. J. Stevens, of the Ninth, 
as they ran at the head of their troops, will al- 
ways stay in my mind. As soon as I was in the 
line I galloped forward a few yards until I saw 
that the men were well started, and then gal- 



1 1 6 The Battle of San Juan Hill 

loped back to help Goodrich, who was in com- 
mand of his troop, get his men across the road 
so as to attack the hill from that side. Captain 
Mills had already thrown three of the other 
troops of the regiment across this road for the 
same purpose. Wheeling around, I then again 
galloped toward the hill, passing the shouting, 
cheering, firing men, and went up the lane, 
splashing through a small stream; when I got 
abreast of the ranch buildings on the top of Ket- 
tle Hill, I turned and went up the slope. Being 
on horseback I was, of course, able to get ahead 
of the men on foot, excepting my orderly, Hen- 
ry Bardshar, who had run ahead very fast in 
order to get better shots at the Spaniards, who 
were now running out of the ranch buildings. 
Sergeant Campbell and a number of the Ari- 
zona men, and Dudley Dean, among others, 
were very close behind. Stevens, with his pla- 
toon of the Ninth, was abreast of us; so were 
McNamee and Hartwick. Some forty yards 
from the top I ran into a wire fence and jumped 
off Little Texas, turning him loose. He had 
been scraped by a couple of bullets, one of which 
nicked my elbow, and I never expected to see 
him again. As I ran up the hill, Bardshar 
stopped to shoot, and two Spaniards fell as he 
emptied his magazine. These were the only 



The Battle of San Juan Hill 1 1 7 

Spaniards I actually saw fall to aimed shots by 
any one of my men, with the exception of two 
guerillas in trees. 

Almost immediately afterward the hill was 
covered by the troops, both Rough Riders and 
the colored troopers of the Ninth, and some 
men of the First. There was the usual confu- 
sion, and afterward there was much discussion 
as to exactly who had been on the hill first. The 
first guidons planted there were those of the 
three New Mexican troops, G, E, and F, of my 
regiment, under their Captains, Llewellen, 
Luna, and Muller, but on the extreme right of 
the hill, at the opposite end from where we 
struck it, Captains Taylor and McBlain and 
their men of the Ninth were first up. Each of 
the five captains was firm in the belief that his 
troop was first up. As for the individual men, 
each of whom honestly thought he was first on 
the summit, their name was legion. One Span- 
iard was captured in the buildings, another was 
shot as he tried to hide himself, and a few 
others were killed as they ran. 

Among the many deeds of conspicuous gal- 
lantry here performed, two, both to the credit 
of the First Cavalry, may be mentioned as ex- 
amples of the others, not as exceptions. Ser- 
geant Charles Karsten, while close beside Cap- 



1 1 8 The Battle of San Juan Hill 

tain Tutherly, the squadron commander, was hit 
by a shrapnel bullet. He continued on the line, 
firing until his arm grew numb ; and he then re- 
fused to go to the rear, and devoted himself to 
taking care of the wounded, utterly unmoved 
by the heavy fire. Trooper Hugo Brittain, 
when wounded, brought the regimental stand- 
ard forward, waving it to and fro, to cheer the 
men. 

No sooner were we on the crest than the 
Spaniards from the line of hills on our front, 
where they were strongly intrenched, opened a 
very heavy fire upon us with their rifles. They 
also opened upon us with one or two pieces of 
artillery, using time fuses which burned very ac- 
curately, the shells exploding right over our 
heads. 

On the top of the hill was a huge iron kettle, 
or something of the kind, probably used for 
sugar refining. Several of our men took shelter 
behind this. We had a splendid view of the 
charge on the San Juan block-house to our left, 
where the infantry of Kent, led by Hawkins, 
were climbing the hill. Obviously the proper 
thing to do was to help them, and I got the men 
together and started them volley-firing against 
the Spaniards in the San Juan block-house and 
in the trenches around it. We could only see 




THE FIGHT AT THE KETTLES. 

These kettles were on the crest of the first hill, up which (leneral Wheeler's division 
charged. Captain Day, of the Rough Riders, was wounded here, and being unable to 
accompany his men, sat on the edge of the second kettle and watched the advance of 
the troops up the second hill. 



The Battle of San Juan Hill 119 

their heads; of course this was all we ever could 
see when we were firing at them in their trenches. 
Stevens was directing not only his own colored 
troopers, but a number of Rough Riders; for in 
a melee good soldiers are always prompt to rec- 
ognize a good officer, and are eager to follow 
him. 

We kept up a brisk fire for some five or ten 
minutes; meanwhile we were much cut up our- 
selves. Gallant Colonel Hamilton, than whom 
there was never a braver man, was killed, and 
equally gallant Colonel Carroll wounded. 
When near the summit Captain Mills had been 
shot through the head, the bullet destroying the 
sight of one eye permanently and of the other 
temporarily. He would not go back or let any 
man assist him, sitting down where he was and 
waiting until one of the men brought him 
word that the hill was stormed. Colonel Viele 
planted the standard of the First Cavalry on 
the hill, and General Sumner rode up. He was 
fighting his division in great form, and was al- 
ways himself in the thick of the fire. As the 
men were much excited by the firing, they 
seemed to pay very little heed to their own 
losses. 

Suddenly, above the cracking of the carbines, 
rose a peculiar drumming sound, and some of 



120 The Battle of San Juan Hill 

the men cried, "The Spanish machine-guns!" 
Listening, I made out that it came from the flat 
ground to the left, and jumped to my feet, 
smiting my hand on my thigh, and shout- 
ing aloud with exultation, "It's the Gatlings, 
men, our Gatlings I" Lieutenant Parker was 
bringing his four Gatlings into action, and shov- 
ing them nearer and nearer the front. Now and 
then the drumming ceased for a moment; then it 
would resound again, always closer to San Juan 
hill, which Parker, like ourselves, was hammer- 
ing to assist the infantry attack. Our men 
cheered lustily. We saw much of Parker after 
that, and there was never a more welcome sound 
than his Gatlings as they opened. It was the 
only sound which I ever heard my men cheer in 
battle. 

The infantry got nearer and nearer the crest 
of the hill. At last we could see the Spaniards 
running from the rifle-pits as the Americans 
came on in their final rush. Then I stopped my 
men for fear they should injure their comrades, 
and called to them to charge the next line of 
trenches, on the hills in our front, from which 
we had been undergoing a good deal of punish- 
ment. Thinking that the men would all come, 
I jumped over the wire fence in front of us and 
started at the double; but, as a matter of fact, 



The Battle of San Juan Hill 121 

the troopers were so excited, what with shooting 
and being shot, and shouting and cheering, that 
they did not hear, or did not heed me ; and after 
running about a hundred yards I found I had 
only five men along with me. Bullets were rip- 
ping the grass all around us, and one of the men, 
Clay Green, was mortally wounded; another, 
Winslow Clark, a Harvard man, was shot first 
in the leg and then through the body. He made 
not the slightest murmur, only asking me to put 
his water canteen where he could get at it, which 
I did; he ultimately recovered. There was no 
use going on with the remaining three men, and 
I bade them stay where they were while I went 
back and brought up the rest of the brigade. 
This was a decidedly cool request, for there was 
really no possible point in letting them stay there 
while I went back; but at the moment it seemed 
perfectly natural to me, and apparently so to 
them, for they cheerfully nodded, and sat down 
in the grass, firing back at the line of trenches 
from which the Spaniards were shooting at 
them. Meanwhile, I ran back jumped over the 
wire fence, and went over the crest of the hill, 
filled with anger against the troopers, and espe- 
cially those of my own regiment, for not having 
accompanied me. They, of course, were quite 
innocent of wrong-doing; and even while I 



122 The Battle of San Jican Hill 

taunted them bitterly for not having followed 
me, it was all I could do not to smile at the look 
of injury and surprise that came over their faces, 
while they cried out, "We didn't hear you, we 
didn't see you go, Colonel; lead on now, we'll 
sure follow you." I wanted the other regiments 
to come, too, so I ran down to where General 
Sumner was and asked him if I might make the 
charge ; and he told me to go and that he would 
see that the men followed. By this time every- 
body had his attention attracted, and when I 
leaped over the fence again, with Major Jen- 
kins beside me, the men of the various regi- 
ments which were already on the hill came with 
a rush, and we started across the wide valley 
which lay between us and the Spanish intrench- 
ments. Captain Dimmick, now in command of 
the Ninth, was bringing it forward; Captain 
McBlain had a number of Rough Riders mixed 
in with his troop, and led them all together; 
Captain Taylor had been severely wounded. 
The long-legged men like Greenway, Goodrich, 
Sharp-shooter Proffit, and others, outstripped 
the rest of us, as we had a considerable distance 
to go. Long before we got near them the Span- 
iards ran, save a few here and there, who either 
surrendered or were shot down. When we 
reached the trenches we found them filled with 



The Battle of San Juan Hill 123 

dead bodies in the light blue and white uniform 
of the Spanish regular army. There were very 
few wounded. Most of the fallen had little 
holes in their heads from which their brains 
were oozing; for they were covered from the 
neck down by the trenches. 

It was at this place that Major Wessels, of 
the Third Cavalry, was shot in the back of the 
head. It was a severe wound, but after having 
it bound up he again came to the front in com- 
mand of his regiment. Among the men who 
were foremost was Lieutenant Milton F. Davis, 
of the First Cavalry. He had been joined by 
three men of the Seventy-first New York, who 
ran up, and, saluting, said, "Lieutenant, we 
want to go with you, our officers won't lead us." 
One of the brave fellows was soon afterward 
shot in the face. Lieutenant Davis's first ser- 
geant, Clarence Gould, killed a Spanish soldier 
with his revolver, just as the Spaniard was aim- 
ing at one of my Rough Riders. At about the 
same time I also shot one. I was with Henry 
Bardshar, running up at the double, and two 
Spaniards leaped from the trenches and fired at 
us, not ten yards away. As they turned to run 
I closed in and fired twice, missing the first and 
killing the second. My revolver was from the 
sunken battle-ship Maine, and had been given 



124 The Battle of San Juan Hill 

me by my brother-in-law, Captain W. S. Cowles, 
of the Navy. At the time I did not know of 
Gould's exploit, and supposed my feat to be 
unique; and although Gould had killed his 
Spaniard in the trenches, not very far from me, 
I never learned of it until weeks after. It is as- 
tonishing what a limited area of vision and ex- 
perience one has in the hurly-burly of a battle. 

There was very great confusion at this time, 
the different regiments being completely inter- 
mingled — white regulars, colored regulars, and 
Rough Riders. General Sumner had kept a 
considerable force in reserve on Kettle Hill, un- 
der Major Jackson, of the Third Cavalry. We 
were still under a heavy fire and I got together 
a mixed lot of men and pushed on from the 
trenches and ranch-houses which we had just 
taken, driving the Spaniards through a line of 
palm-trees, and over the crest of a chain of 
hills. When we reached these crests we found 
ourselves overlooking Santiago. Some of the 
men, including Jenkins, Greenway, and Good- 
rich, pushed on almost by themselves far ahead. 
Lieutenant Hugh Berkely, of the First, with a 
sergeant and two troopers, reached the extreme 
front. He was, at the time, ahead of everyone ; 
the sergeant was killed and one trooper wound- 
ed; but the lieutenant and the remaining troop- 



The Battle of San Juan Hill 125 

er stuck to their post for the rest of the after- 
noon until our line was gradually extended to 
include them. 

While I was reforming the troops on the 
chain of hills, one of General Sumner's aides, 
Captain Robert Howze — as dashing and gal- 
lant an officer as there was in the whole gallant 
cavalry division, by the way — came up with or- 
ders to me to halt where I was, not advancing 
farther, but to hold the hill at all hazards. 
Howze had his horse, and I had some difficulty 
in making him take proper shelter; he stayed 
with us for quite a time, unable to make up his 
mind to leave the extreme front, and meanwhile 
jumping at the chance to render any service, of 
risk or otherwise, which the moment developed. 

I now had under me all the fragments of the 
six cavalry regiments which were at the extreme 
front, being the highest officer left there, and I 
was in immediate command of them for the re- 
mainder of the afternoon and that night. The 
Ninth was over to the right, and the Thirteenth 
Infantry afterward came up beside it. The 
rest of Kent's infantry was to our left. Of 
the Tenth, Lieutenants Anderson, Muller, and 
Fleming reported to me; Anderson was slightly 
wounded, but he paid no heed to this. All 
three, like every other officer, had troopers of 



126 The Battle of San Juan Hill 

various regiments under them ; such mixing was 
inevitable in making repeated charges through 
thick jungle; it was essentially a troop com- 
manders', indeed, almost a squad leaders', fight. 
The Spaniards who had been holding the 
trenches and the line of hills, had fallen back 
upon their supports and we were under a very 
heavy fire both from rifles and great guns. At 
the point where we were, the grass-covered hill- 
crest was gently rounded, giving poor cover, 
and I made my men lie down on the hither 
slope. 

On the extreme left Captain Beck, of the 
Tenth, with his own troop, and small bodies of 
the men of other regiments, was exercising a 
practically independent command, driving back 
the Spaniards whenever they showed any symp- 
toms of advancing. He had received his orders 
to hold the line at all hazards from Lieutenant 
Andrews, one of General Sumner's aides, just 
as I had received mine from Captain Howze. 
Finally, he was relieved by some infantry, and 
then rejoined the rest of the Tenth, which was 
engaged heavily until dark, Major Wint being 
among the severely wounded. Lieutenant W. 
N. Smith was killed. Captain Bigelow had 
been wounded three times. 

In the course of the afternoon the Spaniards 



The Battle of San Juan Hill 127 

in our front made the only offensive movement 
which I saw them make during the entire cam- 
paign; for what were ordinarily called "at- 
tacks" upon our lines consisted merely of heavy 
firing from their trenches and from their skir- 
mishers. In this case they did actually begin to 
make a forward movement, their cavalry com- 
ing up as well as the marines and reserve infan- 
try, while their skirmishers, who were always 
bold, redoubled their activity. It could not be 
called a charge, and not only was it not pushed 
home, but it was stopped almost as soon as it 
began, our men immediately running forward 
to the crest of the hill with shouts of delight at 
seeing their enemies at last come into the open. 
A few seconds' firing stopped their advance and 
drove them into the cover of the trenches. 

They kept up a very heavy fire for some time 
longer, and our men again lay down, only re- 
plying occasionally. Suddenly we heard on our 
right the peculiar drumming sound which had 
been so welcome in the morning, when the in- 
fantry were assailing the San Juan block-house. 
The Gatlings were up again ! I started over to 
inquire, and found that Lieutenant Parker, not 
content with using his guns in support of the at- 
tacking forces, had thrust them forward to the 
extreme front of the fighting line, where he was 



128 The Battle of San Juan Hill 

handling them with great effect. From this time 
on, throughout the fighting, Parker's Gatlings 
were on the right of my regiment, and his men 
and mine fraternized in every way. He kept 
his pieces at the extreme front, using them on 
every occasion until the last Spanish shot was 
fired. Indeed, the dash and efficiency with 
which the Gatlings were handled by Parker was 
one of the most striking features of the cam- 
paign; he showed that a first-rate officer could 
use machine-guns, on wheels, in battle and skir- 
mish, in attacking and defending trenches, 
alongside of the best troops, and to their great 
advantage. 

As night came on, the firing gradually died 
away. Before this happened, however, Cap- 
tains Morton and Boughton, of the Third Cav- 
alry, came over to tell me that a rumor had 
reached them to the effect that there had been 
some talk of retiring and that they wished to 
protest in the strongest manner. I had been 
watching them both, as they handled their 
troops with the cool confidence of the veteran 
regular officer, and had been congratulating my- 
self that they were off toward the right flank, 
for as long as they were there, I knew I was per- 
fectly safe in that direction. I had heard no 
rumor about retiring, and I cordially agreed 



The Battle of San Jitan Hill 129 

with them that it would be far worse than a 
blunder to abandon our position. 

To attack the Spaniards by rushing across 
open ground, or through wire entanglements 
and low, almost impassable jungle, without the 
help of artillery, and to force unbroken infantry, 
fighting behind earthworks and armed with the 
best repeating weapons, supported by cannon, 
was one thing; to repel such an attack ourselves, 
or to fight our foes on anything like even terms 
in the open, was quite another thing. No pos- 
sible number of Spaniards coming at us from in 
front could have driven us from our position, 
and there was not a man on the crest who did 
not eagerly and devoutly hope that our oppo- 
nents would make the attempt, for it would 
surely have been followed, not merely by a re- 
pulse, but by our immediately taking the city. 
There was not an officer or a man on the firing- 
line, so far as I saw them, who did not feel this 
way. 

As night fell, some of my men went back to 
the buildings in our rear and foraged through 
them, for we had now been fourteen hours 
charging and fighting without food. They 
came across what was evidently the Spanish offi- 
cers' mess, where their dinner was still cooking, 
and they brought it to the front in high glee. 



130 The Battle of San Juan Hill 

It was evident that the Spanish officers were liv- 
ing well, however the Spanish rank and file were 
faring. There were three big iron pots, one 
filled with beef stew, one with boiled rice, and 
one with boiled peas; there was a big demijohn 
of rum (all along the trenches which the Span- 
iards held were empty wine and liquor bottles) ; 
there were a number of loaves of rice-bread; 
and there were even some small cans of pre- 
serves and a few salt fish. Of course, among so 
many men, the food, which was equally divided, 
did not give very much to each, but it freshened 
us all. 

Soon after dark, General Wheeler, who in 
the afternoon had resumed command of the cav- 
alry division, came to the front. A very few 
words with General Wheeler reassured us about 
retiring. He had been through too much heavy 
fighting in the Civil War to regard the present 
fight as very serious, and he told us not to be 
under any apprehension, for he had sent word 
that there was no need whatever of retiring, 
and was sure we would stay where we were un- 
til the chance came to advance. He was second 
in command; and to him more than to any other 
one man was due the prompt abandonment of 
the proposal to fall back — a proposal which, if 
adopted, would have meant shame and disaster. 



The Battle of San Juan Hill 131 

Shortly afterward General Wheeler sent us 
orders to intrench. The men of the different 
regiments were now getting in place again and 
sifting themselves out. All of our troops who 
had been kept at Kettle Hill came forward and 
rejoined us after nightfall. During the after- 
noon Greenway, apparently not having enough 
to do in the fighting, had taken advantage of a 
lull to explore the buildings himself, and had 
found a number of Spanish intrenching tools, 
picks, and shovels, and these we used in digging 
trenches along our line. The men were very 
tired, indeed, but they went cheerfully to work, 
all the officers doing their part. 

We finished digging the trench soon after 
midnight, and then the worn-out men lay down 
in rows on their rifles and dropped heavily to 
sleep. About one in ten of them had blankets 
taken from the Spaniards. Henry Bardshar, 
my orderly, had procured one for me. He, 
Goodrich, and I slept together. If the men 
without blankets had not been so tired that they 
fell asleep anyhow, they would have been very 
cold, for, of course, we were all drenched with 
sweat, and above the waist had on nothing but 
our flannel shirts, while the night was cool, with 
a heavy dew. Before anyone had time to wake 
from the cold, however, we were all awakened 



132 The Battle of San Juan Hill 

by the Spaniards, whose skirmishers suddenly 
opened fire on us. Of course, we could not tell 
whether or not this was the forerunner of a 
heavy attack, for our Cossack posts were re- 
sponding briskly. It was about three o'clock in 
the morning, at which time men's courage is 
said to be at the lowest ebb ; but the cavalry di- 
vision was certainly free from any weakness in 
that direction. At the alarm everybody jumped 
to his feet and the stiff, shivering, haggard men, 
their eyes only half opened, all clutched their 
rifles and ran forward to the trench on the crest 
of the hill. 

The sputtering shots died away and we went 
to sleep again. 

In this fight our regiment had numbered 490 
men, as, in addition to the killed and wounded 
of the first fight, some had had to go to the hos- 
pital for sickness and some had been left behind 
with the baggage, or were detailed on other 
duty. Eighty-nine were killed and wounded: 
the heaviest loss suffered by any regiment in the 
cavalry division. The Spaniards made a stiff 
fight, standing firm until we charged home. 
They fought much more stubbornly than at Las 
Guasimas. We ought to have expected this, for 
they have always done well in holding intrench- 
ments. On this day they showed themselves to 



The Battle of San Juan Hill 133 

be brave foes, worthy of honor for their gal- 
lantry. 

I think we suffered more heavily than the 
Spaniards did in killed and wounded (though 
we also captured some scores of prisoners) . It 
would have been very extraordinary if the re- 
verse was the case, for we did the charging; 
and to carry earthworks on foot with dismount- 
ed cavalry, when these earthworks are held by 
unbroken infantry armed with the best modern 
rifles, is a serious task. 



HUNTING WILD ANIMALS 



V 




^Xr 



_. ... .-rii3*j«K- 



THtODORE ROOSEVELT. 
In hunting costume. Taken about 1886. 



OLD EPHRAIM, THE GRISLY BEAR 

The king of the game beasts of temperate 
North America, because the most dangerous to 
the hunter, is the grisly bear ; known to the few 
remaining old-time trappers of the Rockies and 
the Great Plains, sometimes as "Old Ephraim" 
and sometimes as "Moccasin Joe" — the last in 
allusion to his queer, half-human footprints, 
which look as if made by some misshapen giant, 
walking in moccasins. 

Bear vary greatly in size and color, no less 
than in temper and habits. Old hunters speak 
much of them in their endless talks over the 
camp-fires and in the snow-bound winter huts. 
They insist on many species; not merely the 
black and the grisly, but the brown, the cinna- 
mon, the gray, the silver-tip, and others with 
names known only in certain localities, such as 
the range bear, the roach-back, and the smut- 
face. But, in spite of popular opinion to the 
contrary, most old hunters are very untrust- 
worthy in dealing with points of natural history. 
They usually know only so much about any giv- 

137 



138 Hunting Wild Animals 

en game animal as will enable them to kill it. 
They study its habits solely with this end in 
view ; and once slain they only examine it to see 
about its condition and fur. With rare excep- 
tions they are quite incapable of passing judg- 
ment upon questions of specific identity or differ- 
ence. When questioned, they not only advance 
perfectly impossible theories and facts in sup- 
port of their views, but they rarely even agree 
as to the views themselves. One hunter will as- 
sert that the true grisly is only found in Califor- 
nia, heedless of the fact that the name was first 
used by Lewis and Clark as one of the titles they 
applied to the large bears of the plains country 
round the Upper Missouri, a quarter of a cen- 
tury before the California grisly was known to 
fame. Another hunter will call any big brindled 
bear a grisly no matter where it is found; and 
he and his companions will dispute by the hour 
as to whether a bear of large, but not extreme, 
size is a grisly or a silver-tip. In Oregon the 
cinnamon bear is a phase of the small black 
bear; in Montana it is the plains variety of the 
large mountain silver-tip. I have myself seen 
the skins of two bears killed on the upper waters 
of Tongue River; one was that of a male, one 
of a female, and they had evidently just mated; 
yet one was distinctly a "silver-tip" and the oth- 



Old EpJiraim, the Grisly Bear 139 

er a "cinnamon." The skin of one very big bear 
which I killed in the Bighorn has proved a 
standing puzzle to almost all the old hunters to 
whom I have shown it; rarely do any two of 
them agree as to whether it is a grisly, a silver- 
tip, a cinnamon, or a "smut-face." Any bear 
with unusually long hair on the spine and shoul- 
ders, especially if killed in the spring, when the 
fur is shaggy, is forthwith dubbed a "roach- 
back." The average sporting writer, moreover, 
joins with the more imaginative members of the 
"old hunter" variety in ascribing wildly various 
traits to these different bears. One comments 
on the superior prowess of the roach-back; the 
explanation being that a bear in early spring is 
apt to be ravenous from hunger. The next in- 
sists that the California grisly is the only really 
dangerous bear; while another stoutly maintains 
that it does not compare in ferocity with what 
he calls the "smaller" silver-tip or cinnamon. 
And so on, and so on, without end. All of 
which is mere nonsense. 

Nevertheless, it is no easy task to determine 
how many species or varieties of bear actually 
do exist in the United States, and I cannot even 
say without doubt that a very large set of skins 
and skulls would not show a nearly complete in- 
tergradation between the most widely separated 



140 Hunting Wild Animals 

individuals. However, there are certainly two 
very distinct types, which differ almost as widely 
from each other as a wapiti does from a mule 
deer, and which exist in the same localities in 
most heavily timbered portions of the Rockies. 
One is the small black bear, a bear which will 
average about two hundred pounds weight, 
with fine, glossy, black fur, and the foreclaws 
but little longer than the hinder ones; in fact, 
the hairs of the forepaw often reach to their tips. 
This bear is a tree climber. It is the only kind 
found east of the great plains, and it is also 
plentiful in the forest-clad portions of the Rock- 
ies, being common in most heavily timbered 
tracts throughout the United States. The other 
is the grisly, which weighs three or four times 
as much as the black, and has a pelt of coarse 
hair, which is in color gray, grizzled, or brown 
of various shades. It is not a tree climber, and 
the foreclaws are very long, much longer than 
the hinder ones. It is found from the great 
plains west of the Mississippi to the Pacific 
coast. This bear inhabits indifferently lowland 
and mountain; the deep woods and the barren 
plains where the only cover is the stunted 
growth fringing the streams. These two types 
are Very distinct in every way, and their differ- 
ences are not at all dependent upon mere geo- 



Old Ephraim, the Grisly Bear 141 

graphical considerations; for they are often 
found in the same district. Thus I found them 
both in the Bighorn Mountains, each type be- 
ing in extreme form, while the specimens I shot 
showed no trace of intergradation. The huge 
grizzled, long-clawed beast, and its little glossy- 
coated, short-clawed, tree-climbing brother 
roamed over exactly the same country in those 
mountains; but they were as distinct in habits, 
and mixed as little together as moose and cari- 
bou. 

On the other hand, when a sufficient number 
of bears, from widely separated regions are ex- 
amined, the various distinguishing marks are 
found to be inconstant and to show a tendency 
— exactly how strong I cannot say — to fade 
into one another. The differentiation of the 
two species seems to be as yet scarcely com- 
pleted; there are more or less imperfect con- 
necting links, and as regards the grisly it almost 
seems as if the specific characters were still un- 
stable. In the far Northwest, in the basin of the 
Columbia, the "black" bear is as often brown 
as any other color ; and I have seen the skins of 
two cubs, one black and one brown, which were 
shot when following the same dam. When these 
brown bears have coarser hair than usual their 
skins are with difficulty to be distinguished from 



142 Hunting Wild Animals 

those of certain varieties of the grisly. More- 
over, all bears vary greatly in size; and I have 
seen the bodies of very large black or brown 
bears with short foreclaws which were fully as 
heavy as, or perhaps heavier than, some small 
but full-grown grislies with long foreclaws. 
These very large bears with short claws are very 
reluctant to climb a tree; and are almost as 
clumsy about it as is a young grisly. Among 
the grislies the fur varies much in color and 
texture even among bears of the same locality; 
it is of course richest in the deep forest, while 
the bears of the dry plains and mountains are 
of a lighter, more washed-out hue. 

A full-grown grisly will usually weigh from 
five to seven hundred pounds; but exceptional 
individuals undoubtedly reach more than 
twelve hundredweight. The California bears 
are said to be much the largest. This I think is 
so, but I cannot say it with certainty — at any 
rate, I have examined several skins of full-grown 
Californian bears which were no larger than 
those of many I have seen from the northern 
Rockies. The Alaskan bears, particularly 
those of the peninsula, are even bigger beasts; 
the skin of one which I saw in the possession of 
Mr. Webster, the taxidermist, was a good deal 
larger than the average polar bear skin ; and the 




A GRISLY BEAR IN THE WILDS OF WYOMING. 
From a stereograph, copyright, 1904, by Underwood and Underwood, New York. 



Old Ephraim, Ike Grisly Bear 143 

animal when alive, if in good condition, could 
hardly have weighed less than 1,400 pounds. 
Bears vary wonderfully in weight, even to the 
extent of becoming half as heavy again, accord- 
ing as they are fat or lean ; in this respect they 
are more like hogs than like any other animals. 

The grisly is now chiefly a beast of the high 
hills and heavy timber; but this is merely be- 
cause he has learned that he must rely on cover 
to guard him from man, and has forsaken the 
open ground accordingly. In old days, and in 
one or two very out-of-the-way places almost to 
the present time, he wandered at will over the 
plains. It is only the weariness born of fear 
which nowadays causes him to cling to the thick 
brush of the large river bottoms throughout the 
plains country. When there were no rifle-bear- 
ing hunters in the land, to harass him and make 
him afraid, he roved hither and thither at will, 
in burly self-confidence. Then he cared little 
for cover, unless as a weather-break, or because 
it happened to contain food he liked. If the 
humor seized him he would roam for days over 
the rolling or broken prairie, searching for 
roots, digging up gophers, or perhaps following 
the great buffalo herds either to prey on some 
unwary straggler which he was able to catch at 
a disadvantage in a washout, or else to feast on 



144 Hunting Wild Animals 

the carcasses of those which died by accident. 
Old hunters, survivors of the long-vanished 
ages when the vast herds thronged the high 
plains and were followed by the wild red tribes, 
and by bands of whites who were scarcely less 
savage, have told me that they often met bears 
under such circumstances; and these bears were 
accustomed to sleep in a patch of rank sage bush, 
in the niche of a washout, or under the lee of a 
bowlder, seeking their food abroad even in full 
daylight. The bears of the Upper Missouri 
basin — which were so light in color that the 
early explorers often alluded to them as gray or 
even as "white" — were particularly given to 
this life in the open. To this day that close kins- 
man of the grisly known as the bear of the bar- 
ren grounds continues to lead this same kind of 
life, in the far north. My friend, Mr. Rockhill, 
of Maryland, who was the first white man to 
explore eastern Tibet, describes the large gris- 
ly-like bear of those desolate uplands as having 
similar habits. 

However, the grisly is a shrewd beast and 
shows the usual bear-like capacity for adapting 
himself to changed conditions. He has in most 
places become a cover-haunting animal, sly in 
his ways, wary to a degree, and clinging to the 
shelter of the deepest forests in the mountains 



Old Ephraim, the Grisly Bear 145 

and of the most tangled thickets in the plains. 
Hence he has held his own far better than such 
game as the bison and elk. He is much less 
common than formerly, but he is still to be 
found throughout most of his former range; 
save, of course, in the immediate neighborhood 
of the large towns. 

In most places the grisly hibernates, or, as old 
hunters say, "holes up," during the cold season, 
precisely as does the black bear; but as with the 
latter species, those animals which live farthest 
south spend the whole year abroad in mild sea- 
sons. The grisly rarely chooses that favorite 
den of his little black brother, a hollow tree or 
log, for his winter sleep, seeking or making 
some cavernous hole in the ground instead. 
The hole is sometimes in a slight hillock in a 
river bottom, but more often on a hill-side, and 
may be either shallow or deep. In the moun- 
tains it is generally a natural cave in the rock, 
but among the foot-hills and on the plains the 
bear usually has to take some hollow or open- 
ing, and then fashion it into a burrow to his lik- 
ing with his big digging claws. 

Before the cold weather sets in the bear be- 
gins to grow restless, and to roam about seeking 
for a good place in which to hole up. One will 
often try and abandon several caves or partially 



146 Hunting Wild Animals 

dug-out burrows in succession before finding a 
place to its taste. It always endeavors to choose 
a spot where there is little chance of discovery or 
molestation, taking great care to avoid leaving 
too evident trace of its work. Hence it is not 
often that the dens are found. 

Once in its den the bear passes the cold 
months in lethargic sleep ; yet, in all but the cold- 
est weather, and sometimes even then, its slum- 
ber is but light, and if disturbed it will promptly 
leave its den, prepared for fight or flight as the 
occasion may require. Many times when a 
hunter has stumbled on the winter resting-place 
of a bear and has left it, as he thought, without 
his presence being discovered, he has returned 
only to find that the crafty old fellow was aware 
of the danger all the time, and sneaked off as 
soon as the coast was clear. But in very cold 
weather hibernating bears can hardly be wak- 
ened from their torpid lethargy. 

The length of time a bear stays in its den de- 
pends of course upon the severity of the season 
and the latitude and altitude of the country. 

When the bear first leaves its den the fur is 
in very fine order, but it speedily becomes thin 
and poor, and does not recover its condition un- 
til the fall. Sometimes the bear does not betray 
any great hunger for a few days after its ap- 



Old Ephraim, the Grisly Bear 147 

pearance; but in a short while it becomes rav- 
enous. During the early spring, when the 
woods are still entirely barren and lifeless, while 
the snow yet lies in deep drifts, the lean, hungry 
brute, both maddened and weakened by long 
fasting, is more of a flesh eater than at any other 
time. It is at this period that it is most apt to turn 
true beast of prey, and show its prowess either 
at the expense of the wild game, or of the flocks 
of the settler and the herds of the ranchman. 
Bears are very capricious in this respect, how- 
ever. Some are confirmed game and cattle kill- 
ers; others are not; while yet others either are 
or are not accordingly as the freak seizes them, 
and their ravages vary almost unaccountably, 
both with the season and the locality. 

I spent much of the fall of 1889 hunting on 
the head-waters of the Salmon and Snake in Ida- 
ho, and along the Montana boundary line from 
the Big Hole Basin and the head of the Wisdom 
River to the neighborhood of Red Rock 
Pass and to the north and west of Henry's 
Lake. During the last fortnight my com- 
panion was the old mountain man, named 
Griffeth or Griffin — I cannot tell which, as he 
was always called either "Hank" or "Griff." 
He was a crabbedly honest old fellow, and a 



148 Hunting Wild Animals 

very skilful hunter; but he was worn out with 
age and rheumatism, and his temper had failed 
even faster than his bodily strength. He showed 
me a greater variety of game than I had ever 
seen before in so short a time; nor did I ever be- 
fore or after make so successful a hunt. But he 
was an exceedingly disagreeable companion on 
account of his surly, moody ways. I generally 
had to get up first, to kindle the fire and make 
ready breakfast, and he was very quarrelsome. 
Finally, during my absence from camp one day, 
while not very far from Red Rock pass, he 
found my whiskey-flask, which I kept purely for 
emergencies, and drank all the contents. When 
I came back he was quite drunk. This was un- 
bearable, and after some high words I left him, 
and struck off homeward through the woods on 
my own account. We had with us four pack 
and saddle horses; and of these I took a very in- 
telligent and gentle little bronco mare, which 
possessed the invaluable trait of always staying 
near camp, even when not hobbled. I was not 
hampered with much of an outfit, having only 
my buffalo sleeping-bag, a fur coat, and my 
washing-kit, with a couple of spare pairs of 
socks and some handkerchiefs. A frying-pan, 
some salt, flour, baking-powder, a small chunk 
of salt pork, and a hatchet made up a light 



Old Ephraim, the Grisly Bear 149 

pack, which, with the bedding, I fastened across 
the stock saddle by means of a rope and a spare 
packing cinch. My cartridges and knife were 
in my belt; my compass and matches, as always, 
in my pocket. I walked, while the little mare 
followed almost like a dog, often without my 
having to hold the lariat which served as halter. 

The country was for the most part fairly 
open, as I kept near the foot-hills where glades 
and little prairies broke the pine forest. The 
trees were of small size. There was no regular 
trail, but the course was easy to keep, and I had 
no trouble of any kind save on the second day. 
That afternoon I was following a stream which 
at last "canyoned up" — that is, sank to the bot- 
tom of a canyon-like ravine impassable for a 
horse. I started up a side valley, intending to 
cross from its head coulies to those of another 
valley which would lead in below the canyon. 

However, I got enmeshed in the tangle of 
winding valleys at the foot of the steep moun- 
tains, and as dusk was coming on I halted and 
camped in a little open spot by the side of a 
small, noisy brook, with crystal water. The 
place was carpeted with soft, wet, green moss, 
dotted red with the kinnikinnic berries, and at its 
edge, under the trees where the ground was dry, I 
threw down the buffalo bed on the mat of sweet- 



150 Hunting Wild Animals 

smelling pine needles. Making camp took but 
a moment. I opened the pack, tossed the bed- 
ding on a smooth spot, knee-haltered the little 
mare, dragged up a few dry logs, and then 
strolled off, rifle on shoulder, through the frosty 
gloaming, to see if I could pick up a grouse for 
supper. 

For half a mile I walked quickly and silently 
over the pine needles, across a succession of 
slight ridges separated by narrow, shallow val- 
leys. The forest here was composed of lodge- 
pole pines, which on the ridges grew close to- 
gether, with tall slender trunks, while in the val- 
leys the growth was more open. Though the 
sun was behind the mountains there was yet 
plenty of light by which to shoot, but it was fad- 
ing rapidly. 

At last, as I was thinking of turning toward 
camp I stole up to the crest of one of the ridges, 
and looked over into the valley some sixty yards 
off. Immediately I caught the loom of some 
large, dark object; and another glance showed 
me a big grisly walking slowly off with his head 
down. He was quartering to me, and I fired 
into his flank, the bullet, as I afterward found, 
ranging forward and piercing one lung. At the 
shot he uttered a loud, moaning grunt and 
plunged forward at a heavy gallop, while I 



Old Ephraim, the Grisly Bear 151 

raced obliquely down the hill to cut him off. 
After going a few hundred feet he reached a 
laurel thicket, some thirty yards broad, and two 
or three times as long, which he did not leave. 
I ran up to the edge and there halted, not liking 
to venture into the mass of twisted, close-grow- 
ing stems and glossy foliage. Moreover, as I 
halted, I heard him utter a peculiar, savage kind 
of whine from the heart of the brush. Accord- 
ingly, I began to skirt the edge, standing on tip- 
toe and gazing earnestly to see if I could not 
catch a glimpse of his hide. When I was at the 
narrowest part of the thicket, he suddenly left 
it directly opposite, and then wheeled and stood 
broadside to me on the hill-side, a little above. 
He turned his head stiffly toward me; scarlet 
strings of froth hung from his lips; his eyes 
burned like embers in the gloom. 

I held true, aiming behind the shoulder, and 
my bullet shattered the point or lower end of 
his heart, taking out a big nick. Instantly the 
great bear turned with a harsh roar of fury and 
challenge, blowing the bloody foam from his 
mouth, so that I saw the gleam of his white 
fangs; and then he charged straight at me, 
crashing and bounding through the laurel 
bushes, so that it was hard to aim. I waited un- 
til he came to a fallen tree, raking him as he 



152 Hujiting Wild Animals 

topped it with a ball, which entered his chest 
and went through the cavity of his body, but he 
neither swerved nor flinched, and at the moment 
I did not know that I had struck him. He came 
steadily on, and in another second was almost 
upon me. I fired for his forehead, but my bul- 
let went low, entering his open mouth, smashing 
his lower jaw and going into the neck. I leaped 
to one side almost as I pulled trigger; and 
through the hanging smoke the first thing I saw 
was his paw as he made a vicious side blow at 
me. The rush of his charge carried him past. 
As he struck he lurched forward, leaving a pool 
of bright blood where his muzzle hit the 
ground; but he recovered himself and made two 
or three jumps onward, while I hurriedly 
jammed a couple of cartridges into the maga- 
zine, my rifle holding only four, all of which I 
had fired. Then he tried to pull up, but as he 
did so his muscles seemed suddenly to give way, 
his head drooped, and he rolled over and over 
like a shot rabbit. Each of my first three bullets 
had inflicted a mortal wound. 

It was already twilight, and I merely opened 
the carcass, and then trotted back to camp. 
Next morning I returned and with much labor 
took off the skin. The fur was very fine, the an- 
imal being in excellent trim, and unusually 



Old Ephraim, the Grisly Bear 153 

bright colored. Unfortunately, in packing it 
out I lost the skull, and had to supply its place 
with one of plaster. The beauty of the trophy, 
and the memory of the circumstances under 
which I procured it, make me value it perhaps 
more highly than any other in my house. 

This is the only instance in which I have been 
regularly charged by a grisly. On the whole, 
the danger of hunting these great bears has been 
much exaggerated. At the beginning of the 
present century, when white hunters first en- 
countered the grisly, he was doubtless an ex- 
ceedingly savage beast, prone to attack without 
provocation, and a redoubtable foe to persons 
armed with the clumsy, small-bore, muzzle- 
loading rifles of the day. But at present bitter 
experience has taught him caution. He has 
been hunted for sport, and hunted for his pelt, 
and hunted for the bounty, and hunted as a dan- 
gerous enemy to stock, until, save in the very 
wildest districts, he has learned to be more wary 
than a deer, and to avoid man's presence almost 
as carefully as the most timid kind of game. 
Except in rare cases he will not attack of his own 
accord, and, as a rule, even when wounded His 
object is escape rather than battle. 

Still, when fairly brought to bay, or when 
moved by a sudden fit of ungovernable anger, 



154 Hunting Wild Animals 

the grisly is beyond peradventure a very danger- 
ous antagonist. The first shot, if taken at a bear 
a good distance off and previously unwounded 
and unharried, is not usually fraught with much 
danger, the startled animal being at the outset 
bent merely on flight. It is always hazardous, 
however, to track a wounded and worried grisly 
into thick cover, and the man who habitually 
follows and kills this chief of American game 
in dense timber, never abandoning the bloody 
trail whithersoever it leads, must show no small 
degree of skill and hardihood, and must not too 
closely count the risk to life or limb. Bears dif- 
fer widely in temper, and occasionally one may 
be found who will not show fight, no matter 
how much he is bullied ; but, as a rule, a hunter 
must be cautious in meddling with a wounded 
animal which has retreated into a dense thick- 
et, and has been once or twice roused; and 
such a beast, when it does turn, will usually 
charge again and again, and fight to the last 
with unconquerable ferocity. The short dis- 
tance at which the bear can be seen through the 
underbrush, the fury of his charge, and his te- 
nacity of life make it necessary for the hunter 
on such occasions to have steady nerves and a 
fairly quick and accurate aim. It is always well 
to have two men in following a wounded bear 



Old EpJiraim, the Grisly Bear 155 

under such conditions. This is not necessary, 
however, and a good hunter, rather than lose 
his quarry, will, under ordinary circumstances, 
follow and attack it, no matter how tangled the 
fastness in which it has sought refuge; hut he 
must act warily and with the utmost caution and 
resolution, if he wishes to escape a terrible and 
probably fatal mauling. An experienced hunter 
is rarely rash, and never heedless; he will not, 
when alone, follow a wounded bear into a thick- 
et, if by the exercise of patience, skill, and 
knowledge of the game's habits he can avoid 
the necessity; but it is idle to talk of the feat as 
something which ought in no case to be attempt- 
ed. While danger ought never to be needlessly 
incurred, it is yet true that the keenest zest in 
sport comes from its presence, and from the con- 
sequent exercise of the qualities necessary to 
overcome it. The most thrilling moments of an 
American hunter's life are those in which, with 
every sense on the alert, and with nerves strung 
to the highest point, he is following alone into 
the heart of its forest fastness the fresh and 
bloody footprints of an angered grisly; and no 
other triumph of American hunting can com- 
pare with the victory to be thus gained. 



THE BIG-HORN SHEEP 

It has happened that I have generally hunted 
big-horn during weather of arctic severity; so 
that in my mind this great sheep is inseparably 
associated with snow-clad, desolate wastes, ice- 
coated crags, and the bitter cold of a northern 
winter; whereas the sight of a prong-buck, the 
game that we usually hunt early in the season, 
always recalls to me the endless green of the 
midsummer prairies as they shimmer in the 
sunlight. 

Yet in reality the big-horn is by no means 
confined to any one climatic zone. Along the 
interminable mountain chains of the Great Di- 
vide it ranges south to the hot, dry table-lands 
of middle Mexico, as well as far to the north- 
ward of the Canadian boundary, among the tow- 
ering and tremendous peaks where the glaciers 
are fed from fields of everlasting snow. There 
exists no animal more hardy, nor any better 
fitted to grapple with the extremes of heat and 
cold. Droughts, scanty pasturage, or deep 
snows make it shift its ground, but never mere 

156 




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The Big-Hoi'7i Sheep 157 

variation of temperature. The lofty mountains 
form its favorite abode, but it is almost equally 
at home in any large tract of very rough an J 
broken ground. It is by no means an exclu- 
sively alpine animal, like the white goat. It is 
not only found throughout the main chains of 
the Rockies, as well as on the Sierras of the 
south and the coast ranges of western Oregon, 
Washington, and British Columbia, but it aK<> 
exists to the east among the clusters of high hills 
and the stretches of barren Bad Lands that 
break the monotonous level of the great plains. 

Throughout most of its range the big-horn 
is a partly migratory beast. In the summer it 
seeks the highest mountains, often passing above 
timber-line; and when the fall snows deepen it 
comes down to the lower spurs or foot-hills, or 
may even travel some distance southward. If 
there is a large tract of Bad Lands near the 
mountains, sheep may be plentiful in them 
throughout the severe weather, while in the 
summer not a single individual will be found in 
its winter haunts, all having then retired to the 
high peaks. 

Sometimes big-horn wander widely for rea- 
sons unconnected with the weather: all of those 
in a district may suddenly leave it and perhaps 
not return for several years. Such is often the 



158 Hunting Wild Animals 

result of a district being settled, or being ex- 
posed to incessant hunting. After a certain 
number of sheep have been killed the remainder 
may all disappear, possibly one or two small 
bands only staying behind; but it is quite likely 
that two or three years later the bulk of the van- 
ished host will come back again. 

But where the region that they inhabit is cut 
off from the mountains by settled districts, or by 
great stretches of plain and prairie, then the 
sheep that dwell therein can make no such mi- 
grations. Thus they live all the year round in 
the Little Missouri Bad Lands; and though the 
different bands wander away and to and fro for 
scores of miles, especially in the fall — for big- 
horn are far more restless than deer — yet they 
do not shift their positions much on account of 
the season, and are often found in precisely the 
same places both summer and winter. They 
thus bear with indifference exposure to the ex- 
tremes of heat and cold in a climate where the 
yearly variation reaches the utmost possible lim- 
it, the thermometer sometimes covering a range 
of a hundred and seventy degrees in the course 
of twelve months. There are few spots on 
earth much hotter than these Bad Lands during 
a spell of fierce summer weather, and, unlike the 
deer, the sheep cannot seek the shade of the 



The Big- Horn Sheep 159 

dense thickets. In the glare of midday the 
naked angular hills yield no shelter whatever; 
the barren ravines between them turn into ovens 
beneath the brazen sun. The still, lifeless, 
burning air stifles those who breathe it, while 
the parched and heat-cracked canon walls are 
intolerable to the touch. 

But though the mountain sheep can stand 
this, and in fact do so with even less protection 
than the deer, yet they certainly dislike it more 
than do the latter. If mountains arc near, they 
go up them far sooner and far higher than the 
deer. On the other hand, they bear the winter 
blizzards much better, caring less for shelter, 
and keeping their strength pretty well. Ordi- 
narily when in the Bad Lands they do not shift 
their ground save to get on the lee side of the 
cliffs, though the deep snows of course drive 
them from the mountains. A very heavy fall of 
snow, if they are high up on the hills, occasion- 
ally forces a band to enter the evergreen woods 
and make a regular yard, as deer do, beneath 
the overhanging cover-giving branches; then 
they subsist on the scanty browse until they can 
get back to pasture lands. But this is rare. 
Generally they stay in the open, and bid defiance 
to the elements; yet, like other game, t^hey often 
seem to have the knack of foretelling any storm 



160 Hunting Wild Animals 

or cold spell of unusual severity and length. 
On the eve of such a storm they frequently re- 
treat to some secure haven of refuge. This may 
be a nook or cranny in the rocks, or merely a 
slight hollow to leeward of a little grove of 
stunted pines; and there the band may have to 
stay without food for several days, until the 
storm is over. Occasionally they succumb to the 
deep snow; but if they have any kind of chance 
for their lives, this happens less often than with 
either deer or antelope. 

Our American mountain sheep usually go in 
bands of from fifteen to thirty individuals, occa- 
sionally of many more ; while often small parties 
of two or three will stay by themselves. In the 
winter, or sometimes not until the early spring, 
the old rams separate. The oldest and finest are 
often found entirely alone, retiring to the most 
inaccessible solitudes; the younger ones keep in 
little flocks of perhaps half a dozen or so. But at 
all times their habits are very variable ; for they 
are restless, wandering beasts, with something 
whimsical in their tempers, and given at times 
to queer freaks. If the fit seize them, and espe- 
cially if they have been alarmed or annoyed, 
they may at any time leave their accustomed 
dwelling-places, or act in a manner absolutely 
contrary to their usual conduct. They seem to 



The Big-Horn Sheep 161 

have fits of restless waywardness, or even of 
panic curiosity; and so at times wander into un- 
looked-for places, or betray a sudden heedless- 
ness of dangers against which they on ordinary 
occasions carefully guard. This last freak, 
however, is generally shown only in very wild 
localities or among young animals. Where 
hunters are scarce or almost unknown, all wild 
animals are very bold. I have seen deer in re- 
mote forests, and even in little-hunted localities 
near my ranch, so tame that they would stand 
looking at the hunter within fifty yards for sev- 
eral minutes before taking flight. Mountain 
sheep under similar circumstances show a lordly 
disregard for the human intruder, leaving his 
presence at a leisurely gait, in strong contrast to 
the mad gallop of their more sophisticated 
brethren when alarmed. 

A very short experience with the rifle-bearinu; 
portion of mankind changes the big-horn into a 
quarry whose successful chase taxes to the ut- 
most the skill alike of still-hunter and of moun- 
taineer. A solitary old ram seems to be ever on 
the watch. His favorite resting-place is a shell 
or terrace-end high up on some cliff, from 
whence he can see far and wide over the coun- 
try round about. The least sound — the rattle 
of a loose stone, a cough, even a heavy footfall 



1 62 Hunting Wild Animals 

on hard earth — attracts his attention, making 
him at once clamber up on some peak to try for 
a glimpse of the danger. His eyes catch the 
slightest movement. His nose is as keen as an 
elk's, and gives him surer warning than any oth- 
er sense; the slightest taint in the air produces 
immediate flight in the direction away from the 
danger. But there is one compensation, from the 
hunter's standpoint, for his wonderfully devel- 
oped smelling powers; he lives in such very 
broken country that the currents of air often go 
over his head, so that it is at times possible to 
hunt him almost down wind. 

The mountain sheep of America, when the 
choice is open to them, actually seem to prefer 
regions as wild and rugged as they are sterile. 
The tufts of grass between the rocks, the scanty 
blades that grow on the clay buttes, suffice for 
their wants, and the amount of climbing neces- 
sary to get at them is literally a matter of indif- 
ference to beasts whose muscles are like whip- 
cord and whose tendons are like steel. A big- 
horn is a marvellous leaper, perhaps even better 
when the jump is perpendicular than when it is 
horizontal. His poise is perfect; his eye and 
foot work together with unerring accuracy. One 
will unhesitatingly bound or drop a dozen feet 
on to a little rock pinnacle where there is scarce 



The Big- Horn Sheep 163 

a hand's breadth on which to stand. The pres- 
ence of the tiniest cracks in the otherwise smooth 
surface of a sheer rock wall enables a mountain 
sheep to go up it with ease. The proud, lordly 
bearing of an old ram makes him look exactly 
what he is, one of the noblest of game animals; 
his port is the same whether at rest or in motion. 
Except when very badly frightened, his move- 
ments are all made with a certain self-confident 
absence of hurry, as if he were conscious oi a 
vast reserve power of strength and activity on 
which to draw at need. As a mountaineer lie is 
the embodiment of elastic, sinewy strength and 
self-command rather than of mere nervous agil- 
ity. He hardly ever makes a mistake, even 
when rushing at speed over the slippery, ice- 
coated crags in winter. 

The most difficult of all climbing is to go over 
rocks when the ice has fdled up all the chinks and 
crannies, and the flat slabs are glassy in their 
hard smoothness. A black-tail buck is no mean 
climber; yet under such circumstances I have 
seen one lose his footing and tumble head over 
heels, scraping great handfuls of hair off his 
hide; but I have never known a big-horn to 
make a misstep. This is undoubtedly largely 
owing to the difference between the two ani- 
mals in the structure of their feet. A sheep's 



164 Hunting Wild Animals 

hoof is an elastic pad, only the rims and the toe- 
points being hard, and it thus gets a good grip 
on the slightest projection, or on any little 
roughness in the rock. The tracks are very dif- 
ferent from deer tracks, being nearly square in 
form, instead of heart-shaped, the prints of the 
toes rather deep and wide apart, even when the 
animal has been walking. 

A band of sheep will often seem to court cer- 
tain death by plunging off the brink of what 
looks like a perpendicular cliff, where there is 
not a ledge or a crack-yielding foothold. In 
such cases, if the cliff is high, it will be found on 
examination that it is not quite perpendicular, 
and that the sheep, in making the fearful de- 
scent, from time to time touch or strike the cliff 
with their hoofs, thus going down in long 
bounds, keeping their poise all the time. The 
final bound is often made almost head first, as if 
they were diving. 

Narrow ledges, overlooking an abyss the 
fathomless depths of which would make even a 
trained cragsman giddy, are very favorite re- 
sorts. So are the crests of the ridges themselves. 
If in any patch of Bad Lands there is an unusu- 
ally high chain of steep, bare clay buttes, moun- 
tain sheep are sure to select their tops as a regu- 
lar parade-ground. After a rain the clay takes 



The Big-Horn Slurp 165 

their hoof-prints as clearly as if it were sealing- 
wax, and all along the top of the crest they beat 
out a regular walk from one end to the other, 

with occasional little side-paths leading out to 
some overhanging shoulder or jutting spur, 
from whence there is a good view of the sur- 
rounding country. 

The last big-horn I killed in the fall of 1894, 
while I was camped on the Little Missouri, 
some ten miles below my ranch, cost me but 
a single cartridge. The bottoms were broad 
and grassy, and were walled in by rows of high, 
steep bluffs, with back of them a mass of broken 
country, in many places almost impassable for 
horses. The wagon was drawn up on the edge 
of the fringe of tall cottonwoods which stretched 
along the brink of the shrunken river. The 
weather had grown cold, and at night the frost 
gathered thickly on our sleeping-bags. Great 
flocks of sandhill cranes passed overhead from 
time to time, the air resounding with their 
strange, musical, guttural clangor. 

For several days we had hunted persevering- 
ly, but without success, through the broken coun- 
try. We had come across tracks of mountain 
sheep, but not the animals themselves, and the 
few black-tail which we had seen had seen us 



1 66 Hunting Wild Animals 

first and escaped before we could get within 
shot. The only thing killed had been a white- 
tail fawn, which Lambert had knocked over by 
a very pretty shot as we were riding through a 
long, heavily timbered bottom. Four men in 
stalwart health and taking much out-door exer- 
cise have large appetites, and the flesh of the 
white-tail was almost gone. 

One evening Lambert and I hunted nearly to 
the head of one of the creeks which opened close 
to our camp, and, in turning to descend what 
we thought was one of the side coulies leading 
into it, we contrived to get over the divide into 
the coulies of an entirely different creek system, 
and did not discover our error until it was too 
late to remedy it. We struck the river about 
nightfall, and were not quite sure where, and 
had six miles' tramp in the dark along the sandy 
river-bed and through the dense timber bottoms, 
wading the streams a dozen times before we 
finally struck camp, tired and hungry, and able 
to appreciate to the full the stew of hot venison 
and potatoes, and afterward the comfort of our 
buffalo and caribou-hide sleeping-bags. The 
next morning the Sheriff's remark of "Look 
alive, you fellows, if you want any breakfast," 
awoke the other members of the party shortly 
after dawn. It was bitterly cold as we scram- 



The Big- Horn Sheep 167 

bled out of our bedding, and, after a hasty wash, 
huddled around the fire, where the venison was 
sizzling and the coffee-pot boiling, while the 
bread was kept warm in the Dutch oven. 
About a third of a mile away to the west the 
bluffs, which rose abruptly from the river bot- 
tom, were crowned by a high plateau, where the 
grass was so good that overnight the horses had 
been led up and picketed on it, and the man who 
had led them up had stated the previous evening 
that he had seen what he took to be fresh foot- 
prints of a mountain sheep crossing the surface 
of a bluff fronting our camp. The footprints 
apparently showed that the animal had been 
there since the camp had been pitched. The 
face of the cliff on this side was very sheer, the 
path by which the horses scrambled to the top 
being around a shoulder and out of sight of 
camp. 

While sitting close up around the fire finish- 
ing breakfast, and just as the first level sun- 
beams struck the top of the plateau, we saw on 
this cliff crest something moving, and at first 
supposed it to be one of the horses which had 
broken loose from its picket-pin. Soon the 
thing, whatever it w T as, raised its head, and we 
were all on our feet in a moment, exclaiming 
that it was a deer or a sheep. It was feeding 



1 68 Hunting Wild Animals 



£> 



in plain sight of us only about a third of a 
mile distant, and the horses, as I afterward 
found, were but a few rods beyond it on the 
plateau. The instant I realized that it was 
game of some kind I seized my rifle, buckled 
on my cartridge-belt, and slunk off toward the 
river-bed. As soon as I was under the pro- 
tection of the line of cottonwoods, I trotted 
briskly toward the cliff, and when I got to 
where it impinged on the river I ran a little 
to the left, and, selecting what I deemed to be 
a favorable place, began to make the ascent. 
The animal was on the grassy bench, some 
eight or ten feet below the crest, when I last 
saw it; but it was evidently moving hither and 
thither, sometimes on this bench and some- 
times on the crest itself, cropping the short 
grass and browsing on the young shrubs. 
The cliff was divided by several shoulders or 
ridges, there being hollows like vertical gullies 
between them, and up one of these I scram- 
bled, using the utmost caution not to dislodge 
earth or stones. Finally I reached the bench 
just below the sky-line, and then, turning to 
the left, wriggled cautiously along it, hat in 
hand. The cliff was so steep and bulged so 
in the middle, and, moreover, the shoulders 
or projecting ridges in the surface spoken of 



The Dig- Horn Sheep 169 

above were so pronounced, that I knew it was 
out of the question for the animal to have seen 
me, but I was afraid it might have heard me. 
The air was absolutely still, and so I had no fear 
of its sharp nose. Twice in succession 1 peered 
with the utmost caution over shoulders of the 
cliff, merely to see nothing beyond save another 
shoulder some forty or fifty yards distant. 
Then I crept up to the edge and looked over the 
level plateau. Nothing was in sight excepting 
the horses, and these were close up to me, ami, 
of course, they all raised their heads to look. I 
nervously turned half round, sure that if the ani- 
mal, whatever it was, was in sight, it would 
promptly take the alarm. However, by good 
luck, it appeared that at this time it was below 
the crest on the terrace or bench already men- 
tioned, and, on creeping to the next shoulder, I 
at last saw it — a yearling mountain sheep — 
walking slowly away from me, and evidently 
utterly unsuspicious of any danger. I straight- 
ened up, bringing my rifle to my shoulder, and 
as it wheeled I fired, and the sheep made two or 
three blind jumps in my direction. So close was 
I to the camp, and so still was the cold morning, 
that I distinctly heard one of the three men, who 
had remained clustered about the fire eagerly 
watching my movements, call, k By George, he's 



170 Hunting Wild Animals 

missed; I saw the bullet strike the cliff." I had 
fired behind the shoulders, and the bullet of 
course going through, had buried itself in the 
bluff beyond. The wound was almost instanta- 
neously fatal, and the sheep, after striving in 
vain to keep its balance, fell heels over head 
down a crevice, where it jammed. I descended, 
released the carcass and pitched it on ahead of 
me, only to have it jam again near the foot of the 
cliff. Before I got it loose I was joined by my 
three companions, who had been running head- 
long toward me through the brush ever since the 
time they had seen the animal fall. 

I never obtained another sheep under circum- 
stances which seemed to me quite so remarkable 
as these ; for sheep are, on the whole, the wariest 
of game. Nevertheless, with all game there is 
an immense amount of chance in the chase, and 
it is perhaps not wholly uncharacteristic of a 
hunter's luck that, after having hunted faithfully 
in vain and with much hard labor for several 
days through a good sheep country, we should at 
last have obtained one within sight and earshot 
of camp. Incidentally I may mention that I have 
never tasted better mutton, or meat of any kind, 
than that furnished by this tender yearling. 



THE BOBCAT 

In the books the bobcat is always called a 
lynx, which it of course is; but whenever a hunter 
or trapper speaks of a lynx (which he usually 
calls "link," feeling dimly that the other pronun- 
ciation is a plural), he means a lucivee. Hob- 
cat is a good distinctive name, and it is one which 
I think the book people might with advantage 
adopt; for wild-cat, which is the name given to 
the small lynx in the East, is already pre-empted 
by the true wild-cat of Europe. Like all people 
of European descent who have gone into strange 
lands, we Americans have christened our wild 
beasts with a fine disregard for their specific and 
generic relations. We called the bison "buffalo" 
as long as it existed, and we still call the big stag 
an "elk," instead of using for it the excellent 
term wapiti ; on the other hand, to the true elk 
and the reindeer we gave the new names of 
moose and caribou — excellent names, too, by the 
way. The prong-buck is always called antelope, 
though it is not an antelope at all ; and the white 
goat is not a goat; while the distinctive name of 

171 



172 Hunting Wild Animals 

"big-horn" is rarely used for the mountain 
sheep. In most cases, however, it is mere ped- 
antry to try to upset popular custom in such mat- 
ters ; and where, as with the bobcat, a perfectly 
good name is taken, it would be better for scien- 
tific men to adopt it. I may add that in this par- 
ticular of nomenclature we are no worse sinners 
than other people. The English in Ceylon, the 
English and Dutch in South Africa, and the 
Spanish in South America, have all shown the 
same genius for misnaming beasts and birds. 

Bobcats were very numerous where we were 
hunting [in Colorado]. They fed chiefly upon 
the rabbits, which fairly swarmed ; mostly cotton- 
tails, but a few jacks. Contrary to the popular 
belief, the winter is in many places a time of 
plenty for carnivorous wild beasts. In this place, 
for instance, the abundance of deer and rabbits 
made good hunting for both cougar and bobcat, 
and all those we killed were as fat as possible, and 
in consequence weighed more than their inches 
promised. The bobcats are very fond of prairie- 
dogs, and haunt the dog towns as soon as spring 
comes and the inhabitants emerge from their hb 
bernation. They sometimes pounce on higher 
game. We came upon an eight-months' 
fawn — very nearly a yearling — which had been 
killed by a big male bobcat; and Judge Fore 




A BOBCAT. 
From a photograph taken in Colorado, January, 1901. 



The Bobcat 



•;s 



man informed me that near his ranch, a few- 
years previously, an exceptionally large bobcat 
had killed a yearling doe. Bobcats will also 
take lambs and young pigs, and if the chance 
occurs will readily seize their small kinsman, the 
house cat. 

We found that the bobcats sometimes made 
their lairs along the rocky ledges or in holes in 
the cut banks, and sometimes in thickets, prowl- 
ing about during the night, and now and then 
even during the day. We never chased them 
unless the dogs happened to run across them by 
accident when questing for cougar, or when we 
were returning home after a day when we had 
failed to find cougar. Usually the cat gave a 
good run, occasionally throwing out the dogs by 
doubling or jack-knifing. Two or three times 
one of them gave us an hour's sharp trotting, 
cantering, and galloping through the open cedar 
and pinyon groves on the table-lands; ami the 
runs sometimes lasted for a much longer period 
when the dogs had to go across ledges and 
through deep ravines. 

On one of our runs a party of ravens fluttered 
along from tree to trees beside us, making queer 
gurgling noises and evidently perfectly aware 
that they might expect to reap a reward from our 
hunting. Ravens, multitudes of magpies, and 



174 Hunting Wild Animals 

golden and bald eagles were seen continually, 
and all four flocked to any carcass which was 
left in the open. The eagle and the raven are 
true birds of the wilderness, and in a way their 
presence both heightened and relieved the iron 
desolation of the wintry mountains. 

Over half the cats we started escaped, getting 
into caves or deep holes in washouts. In the 
other instances they went up trees and were of 
course easily shot. Tony and Baldy would bring 
them out of any hole into which they them- 
selves could get. After their loss, Lil, who is a 
small hound, once went into a hole in a washout 
after a cat. After a while she stopped barking, 
though we could still hear the cat growling. 
What had happened to her we did not know. 
We spent a couple of hours calling to her and 
trying to get her to come out, but she neither 
came out nor answered, and as sunset was ap- 
proaching and the ranch was some miles off, we 
rode back there, intending to return with spades 
in the morning. However, by breakfast we 
found that Lil had come back. We supposed 
that she had got on the other side of the cat and 
had been afraid or unable to attack it; so that as 
Collins, the cow-puncher, who was a Southerner, 
phrased it, "she just naturally stayed in the hole" 
until some time during the night the cat went out 



The Bobcat 175 

and she followed. When once hunters and 
hounds have come into the land, it is evident that 
the bobcats which take refuge in caves have a 
far better chance of surviving than those which 
make their lairs in the open and go up trees. 
But trees are sure havens against their wilderness 
foes. Goff informed me that he once came in 
the snow to a place where the tracks showed that 
some coyotes had put a bobcat up a tree, and 
had finally abandoned the effort to get at it. A 
single coyote will rarely meddle with a bobcat. 
Any good fighting dog will kill one; but an un- 
trained dog, even of large size, will probably 
fail, as the bobcat makes good use of both teeth 
and claws; they frequently left marks on some of 
the pack. We found them very variable in size. 
My two largest — both of course males — 
weighed respectively thirty-one and thirty-nine 
pounds. The latter, Goff said, was of exception- 
al size, and as large as any he had ever killed. 
The full-grown females went down as low as 
eighteen pounds, or even lower. 

When the bobcats were in the tree tops we 
could get up very close. They looked like large 
malevolent pussies. I once heard one of them 
squawl defiance when the dogs tried to get it out 
of a hole. Ordinarily they confined themselves 
to a low growling. Stewart and Goff went up 



176 Hunting Wild Animals 

the trees with their cameras whenever we got a 
bobcat in a favorable position, and endeavored 
to take its photograph. Sometimes they were 
very successful. Although they were frequently 
within six feet of a cat, and occasionally even 
poked it in order to make it change its position, 
I never saw one make a motion to jump on them. 
Two or three times on our approach the cat 
jumped from the tree almost into the midst of 
the pack, but it was so quick that it got off before 
they could seize it. They invariably put it up 
another tree before it had gone any distance. 



THE COUGAR 

I had long been anxious to make a regular 
hunt after cougar in a country where the 
beasts were plentiful and where we could 
follow them with a good pack of hounds. 
Astonishingly little of a satisfactory na- 
ture has been left on record about the 
cougar by hunters, and in most places the 
chances for observation of the big cats steadily 
grow less. They have been thinned out almost 
to the point of extermination throughout the 
Eastern States. In the Rocky Mountain region 
they are still plentiful in places, but are growing 
less so; while on the contrary the wolf, which 
was exterminated even more quickly in the East, 
is in the West at present increasing in numbers. 
In northwestern Colorado a dozen years ago, 
cougars were far more plentiful than wolves; 
whereas at the present day the wolf is probably 
the more numerous. Nevertheless, there are 
large areas, here and there among the Rockies, 

in which cougars will be plentiful for many years. 

177 



178 Hunting Wild Animals 

No American beast has been the subject of so 
much loose writing or of such wild fables as the 
cougar. Even its name is unsettled. In the 
Eastern States it is usually called panther or 
painter; in the Western States, mountain lion, or, 
toward the South, Mexican lion. The Spanish- 
speaking people usually call it simply lion. It 
is, however, sometimes called cougar in the West 
and Southwest of our country, and in South 
America, puma. As it is desirable where possi- 
ble not to use a name that is misleading and is 
already appropriated to some entirely different 
animal, it is best to call it cougar. 

The cougar is a very singular beast, shy and 
elusive to an extraordinary degree, very coward- 
ly and yet bloodthirsty and ferocious, varying 
wonderfully in size, and subject, like many other 
beasts, to queer freaks of character in occasional 
individuals. This fact of individual variation 
in size and temper is almost always ignored in 
treating of the animal; whereas it ought never 
to be left out of sight. 

The average writer, and for the matter of 
that, the average hunter, where cougars are 
scarce, knows little or nothing of them, and in 
describing them merely draws upon the stock of 
well-worn myths which portray them as terrible 
foes of man, as dropping on their prey from 



The Cougar \ 

trees where they have been lying in wait, etc., 
etc. Very occasionally there appears an ab 
lutely trustworthy account like that by Dr. I I art 
Merriam in his "Adirondack Mammals." 

Fables aside, the cougar is a very interesting 
creature. It is found from the cold, desolate 
plains of Patagonia to north of the Canadi 
line, and lives alike among the snow-clad peaks 
of the Andes and in the steaming forests of the 
Amazon. Doubtless careful investigation will 
disclose several varying forms in an animal 
found over such immense tracts of country and 
living under such utterly diverse conditions. But 
in its essential habits and traits, the big, slinking, 
nearly unicolored cat seems to be much the same 
everywhere, whether living in mountain, open 
plain, or forest, under arctic cold or tropic heat. 
When the settlements become thick, it retires to 
dense forest, dark swamp, or inaccessible moun- 
tain gorge, and moves about only at night. In 
wilder regions it not infrequently roams during 
the day and ventures freely into the open. Deer 
are its customary prey where they are plentiful, 
bucks, does, and fawns being killed indifferently. 
Usually the deer is killed almost instantaneously, 
but occasionally there is quite a scuffle, in which 
the cougar may get bruised, though as tar as I 
know, never seriously. It is also a dreaded ene- 



180 Hunting Wild Animals 

my of sheep, pigs, calves, and especially colts, 
and when pressed by hunger a big male cougar 
will kill a full-grown horse or cow, moose or wa- 
piti. It is the special enemy of mountain sheep. 
In 1886, while hunting white goats north of 
Clarke's fork of the Columbia, in a region where 
cougar were common, I found them preying as 
freely on the goats as on the deer. It rarely 
catches antelope, but is quick to seize rabbits, 
other small beasts, and even porcupines. 

No animal, not even the wolf, is so rarely seen 
or so difficult to get without dogs. On the other 
hand, no other wild beast of its size and power 
is so easy to kill by the aid of dogs. There are 
many contradictions in its character. Like thtf 
American wolf, it is certainly very much afraid 
of man ; yet it habitually follows the trail of the 
hunter or solitary traveller, dogging his foot- 
steps, itself always unseen. I have had this hap- 
pen to me personally. When hungry it will seize 
and carry off any dog; yet it will sometimes go 
up a tree when pursued even by a single small 
dog wholly unable to do it the least harm. It is 
small wonder that the average frontier settler 
should grow to regard almost with superstition 
the great furtive cat which he never sees, but of 
whose presence he is ever aware, and of whose 
prowess sinister proof is sometimes afforded by 



The Cougar 1S1 

the deaths not alone of his lesser stock, but even 
of his milch cow or saddle-horse. 

The cougar is as large, as powerful, and as 
formidably armed as the Indian panther, and 
quite as well able to attack man; yet the in- 
stances of its having done so are exceedingly 
rare. The vast majority of the tales to this ef- 
fect are undoubtedly inventions. But it is fool- 
ish to deny that such attacks on human beings 
ever occur. 

Even when hunted the cougar shows itself, as 
a rule, an abject coward, not to be compared in 
courage and prowess with the grisly bear, and 
but little more dangerous to man than is the wolf 
under similar circumstances. Without dogs it 
is usually a mere chance that one is killed. Goff 
has killed some 300 cougars during the sixteen 
years he has been hunting in northwestern Col- 
orado, yet all but two of them were encountered 
while he was with his pack; although this is in a 
region where they are plentiful. When hunted 
with good dogs their attention is so taken up 
with the pack that they have little time to devote 
to men. When hunted without dogs they never 
charge unless actually cornered, and, as a gen- 
eral rule, not even then, unless the man chooses 
to come right up to them. I knew of one Indian 
being killed in 1887, and near my ranch a cow- 



o 



162 Huntiii 2 Wild Animals 



& 



boy was mauled ; but in the first instance the cou- 
gar had been knocked down and the Indian was 
bending over it when it revived; and in the next 
instance, the cowboy literally came right on top 
of the animal. Now, under such circumstances 
either a bull elk or a black-tail buck will occa- 
sionally fight; twice I have known of wounded 
wapiti regularly charging, and one of my own 
cowboys, George Myer, was very roughly han- 
dled by a black-tail buck which he had wounded. 
In all his experience Golf says that he never but 
once had a cougar start to charge him, and on 
that occasion it was promptly killed by a bullet. 
Usually the cougar does not even charge at the 
dogs beyond a few feet, confining itself to seiz- 
ing or striking any member of the pack which 
comes close up; although it will occasionally, 
when much irritated, make a rapid dash and 
seize some bold assailant. While I was on my 
hunt, one of Golf's brothers lost a hound in hunt- 
ing a cougar ; there were but two hounds, and the 
cougar would not tree for them, finally seizing 
and killing one that came too near. At the same 
time a ranchman not far off set his cattle dog on 
a cougar, which after a short run turned and 
killed the dog. But time and again cougars are 
brought to bay or treed by dogs powerless to do 
them the slightest damage; and they usually 



The Con gar i' 

meet their death tamely when the hunter comes 
up. I have had no personal experience either 
with the South American jaguar or the OKI- 
World leopard or panther; but these great spot- 
ted cats must be far more dangerous adversaries 
than the cougar. 

It is true, as I have said, that a cougar will 
follow a man; but then a weasel will sometimes 
do the same thing. Whatever the cougar's mo- 
tive, it is certain that in the immense majority of 
cases there is not the slightest danger of his at- 
tacking the man he follows. Dr. Hart Merriam 
informs me, however, that he is satisfied that he 
came across one genuine instance of a cougar 
killing a man whose tracks he had dogged. It 
cannot be too often repeated that we must never 
lose sight of the individual variation in character 
and conduct among wild beasts. A thousand 
times a cougar might follow a man either not in- 
tending or not daring to attack him, while in the 
thousandth and first case it might be that the 
temper of the beast and the conditions were such 
that the attack would be made. 

Normally, then, the cougar is not in any way 
a formidable foe to man, and it is certainly by 
no means as dangerous to dogs as it could be if 
its courage and intelligence equalled its power 
to do mischief. It strikes with its forepaw like 



184 Hunting Wild Animals 

a cat, lacerating the foe with its sharp claws ; or 
else it holds the animal with them, while the mus- 
cular forearm draws it in until the fatal bite may 
be inflicted. Whenever possible it strives to bite 
an assailant in the head. Occasionally, when 
fighting with a large dog, a cougar will throw 
itself on its back and try to rip open its antago- 
nist with its hind feet. Male cougars often fight 
desperately among themselves. 

Occasionally, but not often, the cougars I shot 
snarled or uttered a low, thunderous growl as 
we approached the tree, or as the dogs came 
upon them in the cave. In the death-grapple 
they were silent, excepting that one younger cou- 
gar snarled and squalled as it battled with the 
dogs. 

The cougar is sometimes tamed. A friend of 
mine had one which was as good-natured as pos- 
ble until it was a year old, when it died. But one 
kept by another friend, while still quite young, 
became treacherous and dangerous. I doubt if 
they would ever become as trustworthy as a 
tame wolf, which, if taken when a very young 
puppy, will often grow up exactly like a dog. 
At the present time there is such a tame wolf 
with the Colorado Springs greyhounds. It is 
safer and more friendly than many collies, and 
is on excellent terms with the great greyhounds ; 



The Cougar 1S5 

though these are themselves solely used to hunt 
wolves and coyotes, and tackle them with head- 
long ferocity, having, unaided, killed a score or 
two of the large wolves and hundreds of coyotes. 
Hunting in the snow, we were able to tell very 
clearly what the cougars whose trails we were 
following had been doing. Goff's eye for a 
trail was unerring, and he read at a glance 
the lesson it taught. All the cougars which we 
came across were living exclusively upon deer, 
and their stomachs were filled with nothing else, 
much hair being mixed with the meat. In each 
case the deer was caught by stalking and not by 
lying in wait, and the cougar never went up a 
tree except to get rid of the dogs. In the day- 
time it retires to a ledge, or ravine, or dense 
thicket, starting to prowl as the dark conies on. 
So far as I could see the deer in each case was 
killed by a bite in the throat or neck. The cou- 
gar simply rambled around in likely ground un- 
til it saw or smelled its quarry, and then crept up 
stealthily until with one or two tremendous 
bounds it was able to seize its prey. If, as fre- 
quently happened, the deer took alarm in time 
to avoid the first few bounds, it always got away, 
for though the cougar is very fast for a short 
distance, it has no wind whatever. It cannot pur- 
sue a deer for any length of time, nor run before 



1 86 Hunting Wild Animals 

a dog for more than a few hundred yards, if the 
dog is close up at the start. I was informed by 
the ranchmen that when in May the deer leave 
the country, the cougars turn their attention to 
the stock, and are very destructive. 

We started early one morning, intending to go 
to Juniper Mountain, where we had heard that 
cougars were plentiful; but we had only ridden 
about half an hour from the ranch when we came 
across a trail which by the size we knew must 
belong to an old male. It was about thirty-six 
hours old and led into a tangle of bad lands, 
where there was great difficulty in working it 
out? Finally, however, we found where it 
left these bad lands and went straight up a moun- 
tain side, too steep for the horses to follow. 
From the plains below we watched the hounds 
working to and fro until they entered a patch 
of pinyons in which we were certain the cougar 
had killed a deer, as ravens and magpies were 
sitting around in the trees. In these pinyons the 
hounds were again at fault for a little while, but 
at last evidently found the right trail, and fol- 
lowed it up over the hill-crest and out of sight. 
We then galloped hard along the plain to the 
left, going around the end of the ridge and turn- 
ing to our right on the other side. Here we en- 



The C 07i gar 187 

tered a deep narrow valley or gorge which led 
up to a high plateau at the farther end. On our 
right, as we rode up the valley, lay the high and 
steep ridge over which the hounds had followed 
the trail. On the left it was still steeper, the 
slope being broken by ledges and precipices. 
Near the mouth of the gorge we encountered the 
hounds, who had worked the trail down and 
across the gorge, and were now hunting up the 
steep cliff-shoulder on our left. Evidently the 
cougar had wandered to and fro over this shoul- 
der, and the dogs were much puzzled and 
worked in zigzags and circles around it, grad- 
ually getting clear to the top. Then old Boxer 
suddenly gave tongue with renewed zest, and 
started off on a run almost on top of the ridge, 
the other dogs following. Immediately after- 
ward they jumped the cougar. 

We had been waiting below to see which di- 
rection the chase would take and now put spurs 
to our horses and galloped up the ravine, climb- 
ing the hillside on our right so as to get a better 
view of what was happening. A few hundred 
yards of this galloping and climbing brought us 
again in sight of the hounds. They were now 
barking treed and were clustered around a pin- 
yon below the ridge crest on the side hill oppo- 
site us. The two fighters, Turk and Queen, who 



1 88 Hunting Wild Animals 



& 



had been following at our horses' heels, appre- 
ciated what had happened as soon as we did, 
and, leaving us, ran down into the valley and be- 
gan to work their way through the deep snow up 
the hillside opposite, toward where the hounds 
were. Ours was an ideal position for seeing the 
whole chase. In a minute the cougar jumped 
out of the tree down among the hounds, who 
made no attempt to seize him, but followed him 
as soon as he had cleared their circle. He came 
downhill at a great rate and jumped over a 
cliff, bringing after him such an avalanche of 
snow that it was a moment before I caught sight 
of him again, this time crouched on a narrow 
ledge of a cliff some fifteen or twenty feet below 
the brink from which he had jumped, and about 
as far above the foot of the cliff, where the steep 
hill-slope again began. The hounds soon found 
him again and came along the ledge barking 
loudly, but not venturing near where he lay fac- 
ing them, with his back arched like a great cat. 
Turk and Queen were meanwhile working their 
way uphill. Turk got directly under the ledge 
and could not find a way up. Queen went to the 
left and in a minute we saw her white form as 
she made her way through the dark-colored 
hounds straight for the cougar. "That's the end 
of Queen," said Goff ; "he'll kill her now, sure." 




Q 



CC 
< 

D 
O 

o 



c 



u 



~ 






4 
- 



The Cougar 189 

In another moment she had made her rush, and 
the cougar, bounding forward, had seized her, 
and as we afterward discovered had driven his 
great fangs right through the side of her head, 
fortunately missing the brain. In the struggle 
he lost his footing and rolled off the ledge, and 
when they struck the ground below he let go. 
Turk, who was near where they struck, was not- 
able to spring for the hold he desired, and in 
another moment the cougar was coming down 
hill like a quarter horse. We stayed perfectly 
still, as he was travelling in our direction. 
Queen was on her feet almost as quick as the 
cougar, and she and Turk tore after him, the 
hounds following in a few seconds, being de- 
layed in getting off the ledge. It was astonish- 
ing to see the speed of the cougar. He ran con- 
siderably more than a quarter of a mile down 
hill, and at the end of it had left the dogs more 
than a hundred yards behind. But his bolt was 
shot, and after going perhaps a hundred yards 
or so up the hill on our side and below r us, he 
climbed a tree, under which the dogs began to 
bay frantically, while we scrambled toward 
them. When I got down I found him standing 
half upright on a big branch, his forepaws hung 
over another higher branch, his sides pulling 
like bellows, and evidently completely winded. 



19° Hztnting Wild Animals 

In scrambling up the pinyon he must have struck 
a patch of resin, for it had torn a handful of hair 
off from behind his right forearm. I shot him 
through the heart. At the shot he sprang clean 
into the top of the tree, head and tail up, and his 
face fairly demoniac with rage; but before he 
touched the ground he was dead. Turk jumped 
up, seized him as he fell, and the two rolled over 
a low ledge, falling about eight feet into the 
snow, Turk never losing his hold. 

No one could have wished to see a prettier 
chase under better circumstances. It was exceed- 
ingly interesting. The only dog hurt was Queen, 
and very miserable indeed she looked. She stood 
in the trail, refusing to lie down or to join the 
other dogs, as, with prodigious snarls at one an- 
other, they ate the pieces of the carcass we cut 
out for them. Dogs hunting every day, as these 
were doing, and going through such terrific ex- 
ertion, need enormous quantities of meat, and 
as old horses and crippled steers were not always 
easy to get, we usually fed them the cougar car- 
casses. On this occasion, when they had eaten 
until they could eat no longer, I gave most of my 
lunch to Queen — Boxer, who, after his feast 
could hardly move, nevertheless waddling up 
with his ears forward to beg a share. Queen ev- 
idently felt that the lunch was a delicacy, for she 



The Cougar 191 

ate it, and then trotted home behind us with the 
rest of the dogs. Rather to my astonishment, 
next day she was all right, and as eager to ^ r() 
with us as ever. Though one side of her head 
was much swollen, in her w r ork she showed no 
signs of her injuries. 

Early the following morning, February 14th, 
the last day of my actual hunting, we again 
started for Juniper Mountain, following the 
same course on which we had started the pre- 
vious day. Before we had gone a mile, that is, 
only about half way to where we had come across 
the cougar track the preceding day, we crossed 
another, and, as we deemed, a fresher, trail, which 
Goff pronounced to belong to a cougar even 
larger than the one that we had just killed. The 
hounds were getting both weary and footsore, 
but the scent put heart into them, and away they 
streamed. They followed it across a sage-brush 
flat, and then worked along under the base of a 
line of cliffs — cougar being particularly apt thus 
to travel at the foot of cliffs. The pack kept well 
together, and it was pleasant as we cantered over 
the snowy plain beside them, to listen to their 
baying, echoed back from the cliffs above. Then 
they worked over the hill and we spurred 
ahead and turned to the left, up the same gorge 
or valley in which we had killed the cougar the 



192 Hunting Wild Animals 



.•> 



day before. The hounds followed the trail 
straight to the cliff-shoulder where the day be- 
fore the pack had been puzzled until Boxer 
struck the fresh scent. Here they seemed to be 
completely at fault, circling everywhere, and at 
one time following their track of yesterday over 
to the pinyon-tree up which the cougar had first 
gone. 

We made our way up the ravine to the head of 
the plateau, and then, turning, came back along 
the ridge until we reached the top of the shoul- 
der where the dogs had been ; but when we got 
there they had disappeared. It did not seem 
likely that the cougar had crossed the ravine be- 
hind us — although as a matter of fact this was 
exactly what had happened — and we did not 
know what to make of the affair. 

We could barely hear the hounds; they had 
followed their back trail of the preceding day, 
toward the place where we had first come across 
the tracks of the cougar we had already killed. 
We were utterly puzzled, even Goff being com- 
pletely at fault, and we finally became afraid 
that the track which the pack had been running 
was one which, instead of having been made dur- 
ing the night, had been there the previous morn- 
ing, and had been made by the dead cougar. 
This meant, of course, that we had passed it 



The Cougar 103 

without noticing it, both going and coming, on 
the previous day, and knowing Goff's eye for a 
track I could not believe this. He, however, 
thought we might have confused it with some of 
the big wolf tracks, of which a number had 
crossed our path. After some hesitation, he said 
that at any rate we could find out the truth by 
getting back into the flat and galloping around 
to where we had begun our hunt the day before ; 
because if the dogs really had a fresh cougar be- 
fore them he must have so short a start that they 
were certain to tree him by the time they got 
across the ridge-crest. Accordingly we scram- 
bled down the precipitous mountain-side, gal- 
loped along the flat around the end of the ridge 
and drew rein at about the place where we had 
first come across the cougar trail on the previous 
day. Not a dog was to be heard anywhere, and 
Goff's belief that the pack was simply running a 
back track became a certainty both in his mind 
and mine, when Jim suddenly joined us, evident- 
ly having given up the chase. We came to the 
conclusion that Jim, being wiser than the other 
dogs, had discovered his mistake while they had 
not; u he just naturally quit," said Goff. 

After some little work we found where the 
pack had crossed the broad flat valley into a 
mass of very rough broken country, the same in 



194 Hunting Wild Animals 

which I had shot my first big male by moonlight. 
Cantering and scrambling through this stretch 
of cliffs and valleys, we began to hear the dogs, 
and at first were puzzled because once or twice it 
seemed as though they were barking treed or 
had something at bay; always, however, as we 
came nearer we could again hear them running 
a trail, and when we finally got up tolerably close 
we found that they were all scattered out. Boxer 
was far behind, and Nellie, whose feet had be- 
come sore, was soberly accompanying him, no 
longer giving tongue. The others were sepa- 
rated one from the other, and we finally made 
out Tree'em all by himself, and not very far 
away. In vain Goff called and blew his horn; 
Tree'em disappeared up a high hill-side, and 
with muttered comments on his stupidity we gal- 
loped our horses along the valley around the 
foot of the hill, hoping to intercept him. No 
sooner had we come to the other side, however, 
than we heard Tree'em evidently barking treed. 
We both looked at one another, wondering 
whether he had come across a bobcat or 
whether it had really been a fresh cougar trail 
after all. 

Leaving our horses we scrambled up the 
canon until we got in sight of a large pinyon on 
the hillside, underneath which Tree'em was 




o 
u 



S i 



■ 
D 2 



g 1 

- 

I 



The Cougar lot 

standing, with his preposterous tail arched like 
a pump-handle, as he gazed solemnly up in the 
tree, now and then uttering a bark at a huge cou- 
gar, which by this time we could distinctly make 
out standing in the branches. Turk and Queen 
had already left us and were running hard to 
join Tree'em, and in another minute or two all 
of the hounds, except the belated Boxer and Nel- 
lie, had also come up. The cougar having now- 
recovered his wind, jumped down and cantered 
off. He had been running for three hours be- 
fore the dogs, and evidently had been overtaken 
again and again, but had either refused to tree, 
or if he did tree had soon come down and con- 
tinued his flight, the hounds not venturing to 
meddle with him, and he paying little heed to 
them. It was a different matter, however, with 
Turk and Queen along. He went up the hill and 
came to bay on the top of the cliffs, where we 
could see him against the sky-line. The hounds 
surrounded him, but neither they nor lurk came 
to close quarters. Queen, however, as soon as 
she arrived rushed straight in, and the cougar 
knocked her a dozen feet off. Turk tried to 
seize him as soon as Queen had made her rush; 
the cougar broke bay, and they all disappeared 
over the hilltop, w T hile we hurried after them. 
A quarter of a mile beyond, on a steep hill- 



196 Hunting Wild Animals 

side, they again had him up a pinyon-tree. I ap- 
proached as cautiously as possible so as not to 
alarm him. He stood in such an awkward posi- 
tion that I could not get a fair shot at the heart, 
but the bullet broke his back well forward, and 
the dogs seized him as he struck the ground. 
There was still any amount of fight in him, and 
I ran in as fast as possible, jumping and slipping 
over the rocks and the bushes as the cougar and 
dogs rolled and slid down the steep mountain- 
side — for, of course, every minute's delay meant 
the chance of a dog being killed or crippled. It 
was a day of misfortunes for Jim, who was 
knocked completely out of the fight by a single 
blow. The cougar was too big for the dogs 
to master, even crippled as he was ; but when I 
came up close Turk ran in and got the great beast 
by one ear, stretching out the cougar's head, 
while he kept his own forelegs tucked way back 
so that the cougar could not get hold of them. 
This gave me my chance, and I drove the knife 
home, leaping back before the creature could 
get round at me. Boxer did not come up for 
half an hour, working out every inch of the trail 
for himself, and croaking away at short inter- 
vals, while Nellie trotted calmly beside him. 
Even when he saw us skinning the cougar he 
would not hurry nor take a short cut, but fol- 



The Cougar 107 

lowed the scent to where the cougar had gone 

up the tree, and from the tree down to where we 
were; then he meditatively bit the carcass, 

strolled off, and lay down, satisfied. 

It was a very large cougar, fat and heavy, and 
the men at the ranch believed it was the same one 
which had at intervals haunted the place for two 
or three years, killing on one occasion a milch 
cow, on another a steer, and on yet another a big 
work-horse. Goff stated that he had on two or 
three occasions killed cougars that were quite as 
long, and he believed even an inch or two longer, 
but that he had never seen one as large or 
as heavy. Its weight was 227 pounds, and as it 
lay stretched out it looked like a small African 
lioness. It would be impossible to wish a better 
ending to a hunt. 

The next day Goff and I cantered thirty miles 
into Meeker, and my holiday was over. 



The Scribner Series of School Reading 



A Uniform Series for Supplementary Reading in 

Schools. Each, 12 no, nst, *£o.50. 
Hero Tales Told in School. By Jam 

Baldwin. Illustrated. 
Herakles, the Hero of Thebes, and Other 

Heroes of the Myth. By Mary E. Burt and 

Zenaide Ragezin. Illustrated. 
Odysseus : The Hero of Ithaca. By Mart 

E. Burt. Illustrated. 
The Boy General. By Mrs. George A. Custer 

and Mary E. Burt. Illustrated. 
Don Quixote De La Mancha. By Miguel 

de Cervantes. From the translations of DufHeld 

and Shelton. By Mary E. Burt and Lucy 

Leffingwell Cable. 
The Cable Story Book. Selections for School 

Reading. By George W. Cable. Edited by Mary 

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Letters for School Reading. By EuGl 1 1 11 in. 

Edited by Mary E. Burt and Mary L. Cab] 

With an Introduction by George W. Cai 

Illustrated. 
The Howells Story Book. Bv Wii 1 1 am Dean 

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By Sidney Lanier. Edited and arranged By Mary 

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The Page Story Book. Selections f>r School 

Reading by Thomas Nelson Page. Bdil I by 

Frank E. Spalding and Catherine T. Bryck 



Poems of American Patriotism. Chosen by 

Brander Matthews. 

Some Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. 
By Howard Pyle. Illustrated by 'e author. 

The Roosevelt Book. Selections from the 
writings of Theodore Roosevelt, with an introduc- 
tion by Robert Bridges. Illustrated. 

A Child's Garden of Verses. By Robert 
Louis Stevenson. Illustrated. 

Krag and Johnny Bear. Being the Personal 
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By Ernest Thompson Seton. Illustrated. 

Lobo, Rag, and Vixen. Selections from "Wild 
Animals I Have Known." By Ernest Thompson 
Seton. With 4 full-page and many other illus- 
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Twelve Naval Captains. With portraits. By 
Molly Elliott Seawell. 

Fanciful Tales. By Frank R. Stockton. Ed- 
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Around the World in the Sloop Spray. 
By Captain Joshua Slocum. Illustrated. 

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ranged by Professor Edwin Mims, with Biograph- 
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Children's Stories of American Literature, 
1660- 1860. By Henrietta Christian Wright. 

Children's Stories of American Literature, 

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